Once Upon a Time There Was a Traveller

by Various

Genres: Short Stories; Anthologies

Synopsis

Virago Press and the Asham Award, the foremost prize for stories by women, present a collection of tales to send you to places you've never been before . . . Here are tales of people who travel far and those who stay at home and dream; of strange things in suitcases; of roads that should not have been taken; of exotic cities and shabby towns. Some are running away, and some are travelling to come home. With new stories from well-known writers, including Helen Dunmore, and an Angela Carter fable, this is a book to tuck in your backpack, your valise or to enjoy, deep in your armchair, for no one can fail to be hooked by those beguiling words: once upon a time there was a traveller . . .

Release date: August 1, 2013

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 224

Sample

We know the adages about travel, the most famous surely being Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Life is a journey, not a destination’ and Leo Tolstoy’s theory about fiction, marvellously, economically expressed as: ‘All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town’. So it seemed we’d be on to a good thing if we combined stories and travel as the theme for Virago’s second book with Asham, and Carole Buchan from the Asham Literary Endowment Trust – to whom this book and authors owe much thanks – agreed. Happily, joining me as judges were two women who represent some of the finest of travel writing and of literature: Sara Wheeler and Helen Dunmore.

We were given a longlist of forty stories and off we three went on one of the best kinds of journeying: armchair travelling. Unsurprisingly for a book about travel, many of the stories are on the move: on planes; on trains; on the road; and even on the school run. There are mischievous outings; missions to save a life (possibly); memories of childhood journeys and a story about discovering that staying home is sometimes best. We read and emailed, shortlisted and made notes.

When at last we met to make our list of twelve writers and to choose our winners, we did not have an easy time of it as there are many stories of a very fine quality. Says Helen Dunmore, ‘Like travel itself, these stories are full of the unexpected. I love the polish and boldness of the writing, and congratulate the authors.’

But we did eventually come to an agreement and chose a spare and brilliant story set in South Africa, The Journey to the Brothers’ Farm by Pippa Gough, as our First Prize winner. We judged the stories without any knowledge of even the authors’ names, but now that I can read Pippa Gough’s biography I see that she spent most of her childhood in Africa. She writes evocatively of the land and the haze of the heat, the dust and the grass roofs warming in the early morning sun. As she leads us slowly, reluctantly, down the road to the brothers’ farm, we are torn between desperately wanting and never wanting to know what’s at the end of the track… There we find a place where brutality and justice are sometimes too close to separate. Brilliantly handled and powerfully, simply told.

Our Second Prize winner is by Dolores Pinto. Her story, Where Life Takes You, is about a young woman who has somehow ended up in Whitby, a small seaside town, where she doesn’t belong, where she feels different, where she knows everyone is looking at her. She wants to travel back to London ‘to walk unnoticed between tall buildings’. How can this place be where she will stay? It is a beautiful, deceptively slight story about longing, loss, love, and finding out what home is.

The Elephant in the Suitcase by Deepa Anappara is a fantasy – or it is reality? – about a forest guard working for ten years in a place full of shrieking birds, wild dogs, sambars and a very pesky nocturnal elephant who makes him see it is high time to leave! Playful and truthful, it is wonderfully unexpected and winner of our Third Prize.

And we decided to award an Honourable Mention to Pay Day by Dawn Nicholson, a heart-breaking story about a teenager who sacrifices everything to send his young brother off on an adventure, to save his life. Powerful and touching.

Sara Wheeler expresses all our pleasure with the final selection: ‘I so enjoyed reading these richly diverse stories. They took me to many new places, real and imaginary, and constantly confounded my expectations. Bravo les filles.’

The tradition with Asham is to invite a few established writers to publish alongside the debut ones. Here is Susie Boyt’s glorious story set in an old people’s home with a pair who’ve come ‘an awfully long way from the Dudley Hippodrome’; Helen Dunmore’s startling and disturbing glimpse of youth as it passes through an airport on its way to fight in Afghanistan; and an extract from Angela Carter’s beguiling 1967 novel, The Magic Toyshop, about a young girl’s journey away from innocence. Ultimately, I suppose, that – a journey from innocence – is perhaps what all journeys are about. But no one does it the same way and this is a great book of talent with laughter, ruefulness, sadness, wisdom, absurdity, curiosity, melancholy all packed up and ready to go.

 

Lennie Goodings 

Publisher, Virago 

Patras station is tall and yellow with pale marble floors, more solid than the bus station and less crowded; it looks like a grown-up building that could save you. The woman in front of Samantha buys a First-Class ticket and it seems so cheap that she copies her.

The seats in First Class are wide and green with three across the carriage not four. Samantha has never travelled First Class before. She looks down at her bitten finger-nails and makes fists to hide them. The ticket says 14A but when she sits in it the seat slides and swivels so she moves. The guard comes in and fixes 14A with a kick of a lever, looking at her snottily. You can turn it to face forwards or backwards, that’s why it slithered. The old woman with a stick and gold leather shoes across the aisle – the one who’d been in front in the queue – is watching her. Samantha is too embarrassed to move back to her real seat. And anyway she’s set herself up in the new one, barricaded by plastic bags. But now she’s anxious at every station and ready to leap up and vacate. In her mind she practises the smile and ‘my mistake’ gesture. She tries a little grin but her lip wobbles and it feels like a sneer. She’s regretting First Class now but if she moves down the train everyone will stare.

Out of the carriage window she sees orange trees like lollipops dotted with fruit. After five years she still can’t believe they’re real. A line of small children dressed for winter (although it seems warm to Samantha) stand holding hands by the track. When the smallest boy on the end lifts his arm in a wave, she lets her head sink to the table then fumbles a small blue cardigan out from one of her bags.

Each station takes her further away which is good and bad. She screws up her eyes and concentrates on the good: Mam and Dad; her sisters; feeling normal; nights on the town with the lasses; home. She rubs out nights on the town and adds an NVQ in hairdressing (if she’s not too old now).

The bad side is a hard grey lump sitting in her stomach. She sings ‘All Things Bright And Beautiful’ over and over in her head to block it out then lifts the little cardigan to her face; breathing in. How long will his smell last? Will she suck it all out? A sudden panic makes her insides lurch and she hugs the carrier bag. It’s the first time today she’s really felt anything. Since she got up this morning and put on her church clothes she’s been doing everything from a distance: catching the bus; getting to the station; changing her clothes in the toilet. She can’t allow herself to think too much. She holds on to the idea that when she gets home, Mam and Dad will sort it all out. They’ll get Alexander later. But she keeps it in a corner of her mind, skirting round it because she knows it’s fragile and empty like the blown egg on the nature table that she held too hard and then lied about. She hasn’t told them she’s coming. And part of her is just embarrassed about running home (‘tail between her legs’ she hears in her Nana’s voice) after all that showing off of her tan; starting sentences with, ‘Well in Greece, we…’; and ordering in Greek in the restaurant in the Bigg Market. But that’s too shameful to admit. And too small – a tiny spot on the bigness of it all.

The biggest thing she’s ever done before was in a whoosh of romance and wanting to be different from her sisters. She had nothing to lose then but a job on the check-out at Morrison’s. It didn’t even seem like a decision. This one she’s gnawed at for ages: hanging it out with the washing; chopping it up with the vegetables; turning it over and over. She’s been heavy with it for months. She pictures her mother’s face as she walks through the door. A warm thought, spongy with relief, but then she can’t stop the next one sneaking in as her mam’s voice asks, ‘But where’s the bairn?’ She hates it when thoughts jump out of nowhere or creep in behind others. She wants to blank them out but they keep coming back like felt-tip pen under emulsion paint. She pictures a NEXT CUSTOMER, PLEASE sign between one clump of thoughts and another. If only. The check-out doesn’t seem so hard now. She thinks of those men whose wives have left them, getting seedier every week with their ready meals and cans of Carlsberg. She always chatted to them. Nikos won’t go like that. He has his mother and sister and aunts and cousins. Sometimes the same man would come in all smartened up, buying wine and foreign cheese, and you could tell he’d found someone new. She thinks of another woman putting on Alexander’s little shoes. He hates anyone doing it, even her, and the blank-faced woman won’t know about the boat game. She jumps up; she’s got to go back. But the old woman is moving down the carriage like a crab, stick in one hand, the other papery and yellow, fluttering and landing on each seat in turn. And Samantha sinks back down. As the woman’s hand settles on the top of 14A, the chair twists round and the woman twirls and crumples, a bundle of sticks, too many arms and legs; her Gucci sunglasses now wonky on the thin pale face. Her paper-bag brown hair splays out so you can see her pale blue scalp underneath. At first all Samantha thinks is ‘I fucking told you so!’ to the guard, but then the woman crashes down, her head catching on the corner of the drinks tray. As she lands in Samantha’s lap a thin stream of blood runs down her forehead, disappears under the glasses and trickles out like a tear. Samantha cradles the woman, reaching into her bag for a tissue. Quickly she wipes the wound, all the time whispering words in Greek, hugging the fragile body. A whiff of rabbit hutches pokes through the smell of perfume and talc and hair-spray. When Samantha has helped her back to her seat, the old lady, in a hard, high voice refuses any more help and forbids her from telling anyone.

Samantha flinches at the dressed-in-black voice and knows she can’t go back. Not to the house where Nikos’s mother sits in the corner like a big spider watching her and making noises that mean she’s doing something wrong though she never knows what. Sometimes she rips Alexander out of her arms, making him cry. Samantha cries later. She lies awake waiting for Nikos. If she complains he takes his mother’s side now, so she keeps quiet, swallowing the sobs as he turns his back. And it’s not just at home. The tentacles slither into every corner of the town. She can’t walk down the street without someone shouting, ‘Where are you off to?’ or ‘What are you up to?’ The whole town is his cousin. At first she thought it was lovely.

When Nikos lost first one and then another job they had moved to the mainland to live with his mother. It was very different to when she had first visited. Then she was pregnant and everyone had made a big fuss of her. She had been trailed round to all the relatives who said how tall she was (the best thing for a girl to be in Greece), how pretty she was (like Lady Di) and how good her Greek was. She’d liked the attention then. And after Alexander was born it was like being a celebrity. But it didn’t last and the new house with an en-suite bathroom that Nikos had promised stopped being mentioned.

A few months ago she’d started going to the English church in Patras. She always dressed in smart clothes and got the bus. His mother accepted it because it was religion. Nikos or Yiannis would pick her up afterwards. The first time she had poked her head in and it smelt familiar, although in England she only went to church for weddings. The vicar had said, ‘It’s not an uncommon phenomenon, Samantha, there’s an enormous cultural gulf,’ and ‘My door is always open’. She had lied about the time, and before the service just walked round the city or sat in cafés. Of course she was watched, but strangers’ eyes have no befores and afters. They thought she was a blonde tourist. Eyes in the town were on long stalks stretching back to her husband’s mother. ‘Husband’ felt like a fib.

The train is moving so slowly and so close to the street that she can see the pink insides of people’s mouths as they stand chatting. Four teenage girls in identical black trousers stand in a group, all of them on their mobiles talking to someone else.

Samantha was seventeen and on holiday when she met Nikos. At work they said things like, ‘On . . .