Clare Chambers: ‘I found inspiration in an old newspaper clipping about a hidden man’

Clare Chambers, the best-selling author of Small Pleasures, has published a new novel that once again delves into the recent past to solve a mystery.

Shy Creatures is set in Croydon in 1964. Helen Hansford is in her thirties and an art therapist in a psychiatric hospital where she has been having a long love affair with Gil, a charismatic, married doctor.

One afternoon they receive a call about a disturbance from a derelict house not far from Helen’s home. A 37-year-old man called William Tapping, with a beard down to his waist, has been discovered along with his elderly aunt. It is clear he has been shut up in the house for decades, but when it emerges that William is a talented artist, Helen is determined to discover his story.

The ‘Hidden Man’ who comes to Westbury Park Hospital will change her life in unexpected ways. Ahead of her visit to Waterstone’s in Cambridge, Clare Chambers spoke with Alex Spencer about her novel.

Tell me about the real life inspiration for the story.

When I was researching the 1950s for my last novel, Small Pleasures, I was looking through an online archive of local newspapers and came across the story about a man who’d been found with a long beard in a house in Bristol, who had been shut off from the world with his elderly aunt for decades. I thought that's an interesting story and I wondered how it resolved itself. He was carted off to a psychiatric hospital. I wondered if they managed to rehabilitate him and kind of get to the bottom of it. And then I looked forward a year later in the archive to see what happened to him and I saw that he had drowned.

Have you retold that story in your book?

Originally I was thinking of telling the story as it was. And then I decided I couldn’t do that. I needed to give him a brighter future and try and work out how that would be possible. For the readers of Small Pleasures who hadn’t liked the (sad) ending, I felt I couldn’t do it to them again. I had to give him something better, something to hope for. So that’s really the driver of it.

Do you often look for story ideas in old newspapers?

The British Newspaper Archive is a great resource. I’m often using it for research. If you want to find out what happened on a particular day in a particular place or something, you can search by date and place, and it has all kinds of local newspapers, not so much national newspapers. So you do find these local stories and if you’re writing fiction set at a particular place in time, it’s a good way of finding out the little insignificant themes that were going on in the local area. So I use it a lot for that. And I check whether certain phrases were in use at that time. Dictionaries don’t really tell you that.

Tell me about Helen, who is an art therapist and the main character in the story. Why did you want her to tell the story?

I chose art therapy because I didn’t want it to be one of those novels where it’s about endless psychotherapy sessions between doctor and patient, especially as William is mute. Art therapy was a new discipline then, and it’s untried and untested, and using Helen gave me the opportunity to explore women’s choices and chances in the 60s and see whether relationships, marriage, family were another kind of straight jacket for women.

Why is she interested in William?

She’s also a kind of detective. There’s always a person who is investigating or wants to question the truth, and I thought that that would be a good way of interrogating those issues. And then it gave me the opportunity for William to have some hobby that would explain what he’d been doing for 20 years locked in a house. If he’s an artist himself, that will give her a reason to attach to him rather than to any other patient, because she thinks, ‘Ah, here’s someone I can help’.

Why did you choose the 1960s to set your story?

Psychiatry was going through a really interesting period of change and upheaval in the in the early 60s, so I thought that a story set in a psychiatric hospital would be more interesting in the era of RD Laing with his new and and perhaps controversial views about madness and sanity and treatment of patients. He had patients living in a community. He wasn’t the pioneer of this, exactly, because earlier practitioners had disputed whether mental illness was really a disease of the mind, or whether it was driven by intolerable circumstances. And Laing thought insanity is an entirely rational adjustment to an insane world. But his well-meaning, humane approach to mental illness became slightly overshadowed by his rather rackety private life.

What went wrong with RD Laing’s approach?

His idea was to create this utopian community where doctors and patients all live together and there would be no rules and no boundaries, and people could just express themselves, and it’d all be fine. And obviously it wasn’t fine. It was absolutely chaotic and collapsed, as you’d imagine. I think his motivation initially was quite benign. But then he started to recommend people experiment with LSD which was, perhaps, a step too far for most people and not necessarily beneficial to their mental health. So he’s a very interesting figure. He’s only a background footnote in this story, but my psychiatrist character is a kind of acolyte of his and a new progressive. And so it’s his views against the more conservative ones that are being sort of teased out.

Your psychiatrist character, Gil, does overstep some boundaries with a patient.

I was just showing that these charismatic people are often egomaniacs, and they thrive on attention, and chaos. As we read Gil now, he seems much more of a monster than he would in the 60s, I think his behaviour wouldn’t have been that questionable in the 60s. He wouldn’t even really have been seen as overstepping the mark. But reading it, as a modern reader, we feel that he’s dangerous.

What do you enjoy about writing about the past?

I feel like technology has just become too deadening an influence on fiction. It’s really hard to write contemporary fiction without it, without technology featuring as such a main player. So it’s nice go back into an age where people can be disconnected from the world more easily. I think that’s when interesting things happen, when communication is thwarted, and when people are in more jeopardy. It may also be like a feature of ageing, that the future and the present are less interesting because you’ve got less of it; you’ve got more past than future when you get to be nearly 60.

An Evening with Clare Chambers takes place at Waterstones bookshop in Cambridge on Wednesday, 23 October, from 6-7.30pm, where she will discuss the book and then sign copies. Tickets, priced £8, are available at waterstones.com/events/an-evening-with-clare-chambers/cambridge.