Gill Gregory: The Sound of Turquoise (Kingston University Press, 2009)
My childhood was spent in a small Surrey village near Epsom Downs and after leaving school I traveled for many years before settling in London on the Clapham Brixton borders. I teach part-time at The University of Notre Dame in London to support my writing. I was awarded a PhD by Birkbeck College and have written a biography of Adelaide Procter, a London poet published by Charles Dickens in his journal Household Words. I am also a poet and my poems are published in a variety of journals including Poetry Review, The Reader and Stand. My first collection, In Slow Woods, is to be published by Rufus Books in Toronto. I’ve reviewed books by Meera Syal, Yasmin Alibhai-Browne and others for The Times Literary Supplement. My book, The Sound of Turquoise, won the Kingston University Press competition for Biography & Memoir (2008) which was judged by Kathryn Hughes, Rachel Cusk and Hanif Kureishi. Winning the competition came as a big surprise and, with the encouragement of KUP, I then reworked the material as a third person narrative. The Sound of Turquoise was launched on December 1st at the London Review Bookshop in Bloomsbury, where the early chapters of The Sound of Turquoise are set. The bookshop was packed, with my American students bringing a lot of energy and excitement to the evening. Many family and friends came from as far afield as Easdale Island off the Scottish coast.
The ‘turquoise’ of the title refers to the domes of Central Asian mosques which my Russian grandfather, Alexis, leaves behind after his entire family was killed in Tashkent in 1904. I only met my grandfather once, at the age of nine, when my father and I visited him in his London flat. The memory is still very vivid – he was short and stocky and had a strong Russian accent. He laughed a lot and radiated a great deal of warmth. The story of his flight to England (on his own) at the age of fourteen has always fascinated me and I began writing and researching his story a few years ago after going to a talk on Uzbekistan at my local Waterstone’s. The other story in The Sound of Turquoise is that of my brother, Andrew, who suffered from a very severe form of epilepsy. I didn’t want my book to read as a narrative primarily about illness, so the lives of Alexis and Andrew, the stories of an extremely resilient boy and of a very ill boy, are juxtaposed. Meg (who is based on myself) has these two stories running in her imagination on parallel lines, with both containing moments of high drama and many surprises.
The girl on the cover of The Sound of Turquoise is myself, aged about nine. The bandstand beside her is based on the Clapham Common bandstand but also nods to the Central Asian domes. I am holding a live monkey (the pic was taken outside Hampton Court in the early sixties)!
The following is one of my poems about Alexis from In Slow Woods:
Grandfather
At the side of a tiny dock
a half-built house
I cannot see for dust
and as I sleep my head inclines
to verge upon
the day’s first sound
a balalaika breeze
I call the song my own
triangular, traveling
wrapped up in tones
of once upon a once upon
his heart was alone
and younger than my dreams
Alexis came to London
began to settle
settle in.
Gill Gregory, In Slow Woods, 2009
Thursday, 21st January, 2010
Gill Gregory, reading and signing The Sound of Turquoise at West End Lane Books, 277 West End Lane, West Hampstead, NW6 1QS. Tel: 020 7431 3770. Please rsvp to Danny at info@welbooks.co.uk (West Hampstead Tube Station). Free entry - wine and a reading at 8pm.
Sat & Sun, 6th – 7th February, 2010
Gill
Comments