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nym_wibblyIn the past you posted about being the kid of an alcoholic. Did your own background influence the Tavish characters in BOT?No, other than my inbuilt familiarity with the underlying patterns of alcohol and other addiction. My father, thankfully, was loving and encouraging, and valued me as an individual in a way that was rather ahead of the times. He drank enough to destroy his liver and die of it, and he bought rounds in the pub with an awful lot of our household money, so we were very poor even though he had a good job. That strained my parents’ marriage – I imagine my mother copped a lot more of the addict’s passive-aggressive selfishness than I did, and they rowed about it until they broke up, but he was never violent. I never knew him to be aggressive at all. That was the extent of its impact on my own childhood: poverty and overhearing a few rows.
~ Anon
Part of Dacey Tavish – the cruel and reasoning part – is based on a neighbour of ours, a contemporary of my parents, who I learned in my teens had beaten his wife and terrorised his children when we were small. Part of it is my perception of how society, in the form of our little street of young families, handled the situation. Looking back, even though I was a very small child, I can piece together a story from a few events. Only once did anyone call the police. On one occasion, my aforementioned, totally un-aggressive father and another local dad went and “had a word” with the wife beater, but on the whole, everybody knew and nobody did anything until his wife was able to reach out for help and threw him out of the house.
That was the 1970’s, and I see echoes of it both in my family history research going back a couple of hundred years, and on any given page of news today. That’s what I’m writing about, far more than any experience of my own; that lack of change, that apathy in a community that doesn’t quite know what to do about someone else’s problem, and is afraid of getting into trouble if they try.
As a nominal hero figure, Belle is facing a situation where saving the victim and punishing the villain isn’t all story-book neat and tidy.