#Blogtour: Another Rebecca by Tracey Scott-Townsend @authortrace #guestpost #RandomThingsTours

It’s a delight today to be part of the blog tour for Another Rebecca by Tracey Scott-Townsend, the second edition due for publication on 13th September by Wild Pressed Books. I’ve had the great pleasure of spending time in Tracey’s company at a few book-related events, and I’d very much like to read one of her books: sadly, I just couldn’t manage that for the blog tour, but Tracey very kindly sent me copies of both Another Rebecca and her poetry collection So Fast, and I do hope I’ll be able to read and review both at some point in the future.

Let’s take a closer look at Another Rebecca…

A gripping psychological family drama about Rebecca Grey, a sensitive girl who’s spent her childhood caring for her alcoholic mother, Bex. They lurch from one poverty-stricken situation to another until Rebecca is hospitalised with exhaustion. While there, she has an illness-triggered hallucination which entangles her deeper than ever into her mother’s psyche. As an art student, Rebecca can’t understand why she is repeatedly impelled to paint a white horse in a blue landscape. And then there is the boy with yellow hair who she glimpses from the corner of her eye.

Bex’s life was frozen by a shocking tragedy when she was nineteen. Her ‘great grief’ caused her to make a decision which nobody must ever find out about. Rebecca has been implicated in her mother’s lies since the moment of her birth, a fact that her father, Jack, has no inkling of.

As Rebecca gets to know her father’s new family, the gap between her and her mother widens. The mystery of Bex’s dark past comes into focus when an old woman she has never met contacts Rebecca, claiming to be her grandmother.

The thunder of hooves is getting closer for both Rebecca and Bex and the blond-haired boy is more and more often in Rebecca’s dreams. Can Bex continue to keep Rebecca in the dark about the circumstances of her birth, or will the final twist in her tail set Rebecca free to make a new life of her own?

Adapted from a short story written by the author when she was an art student, Another Rebecca was inspired by the painting There is no Night by Jack B. Yeats.

So no review from me this time, but I’m delighted to welcome Tracey Scott-Townsend as my guest today…

I feel lucky in that I have a wealth of life-story background material to use in my books. Here’s how my character Rebecca benefits from my mid-teenage years in my novel Another Rebecca.

When I was sixteen, my family moved from the home of my childhood. Partly in effort to revive a flagging marriage, my parents had sold the house and bought a quarter-acre of land in a village ten miles out of town. Dad was an award-winning bricklayer and would single-handedly build the family a new home. It took him four years of evenings and weekends. We all got to lay a brick or two (and it honed my Lego skills for my later years of motherhood). Before the roof was on the house I once slept in the shell of the building under the rafters with the dog beside me in her basket. By the time the architect-designed, artisan-built house was completed, the family was depleted. Only the three youngest (of seven) siblings were still living at home, from five at the beginning of the project. You’ve probably seen on Grand Designs how stressful it is living on a building site with limited resources and primitive conditions? Well, it is.

Our excitement was somewhat dissipated when we were first driven out in Betsy – the red Transit van – to see the land Dad had bought. Instead of the buttercup-strewn field we thought he was indicating, our new home was a bare, stone-clogged area next to a derelict pub. Dad acquired a couple of old caravans from a mate of a mate and we moved there in November 1978. It was a freezing winter and our only source of water – a tap on the land – soon ceased to flow. We had to beg water from the village shop.

Before long we had running water in the kitchen of the main van and soon enough Dad had built a shelter connecting the two caravans so we didn’t have to take an umbrella to cross between them and get to bed. Until he built a shower room from breeze blocks we bathed ourselves in a plastic dustbin – which we filled painstakingly from boiled pans of water – in the kitchen. I revised for my O’ Levels by the light of candles or the Tilly lamp. Until I knocked down the Tilly lamp and broke it, then it was just candles. We had to get on the school bus at about seven in the morning and stay behind at school until five o’clock on those dark winter evenings, waiting for the bus home.

I acquired my first sort-of-boyfriend on that bus. His stop was the village before mine and we regularly made eye-contact as he passed the window by which I sat. Soon we were sitting together on the bus and eventually he asked me if I would be his girlfriend and I said yes. Unfortunately the relationship never really progressed much further than that. I was sixteen, socially awkward and had never been kissed. I wondered if I ever would be.

I give my experience of being a socially-awkward teenager, living in a caravan on a building site, to Rebecca. She’s pretty much the way I was then. (Although she loses her virginity at a younger age than I did. Did I mention I have no filter on what I ought to give away or keep to myself, either?!) Whereas Rebecca lives with her alcoholic mother in that caravan, it was my father who felt unable to resist the pull of the functioning pub directly across the road from our site. I lived at North Scarle for almost two years before I left home and went to stay with my older sister. My younger siblings and I were a bit of a novelty amongst the village youngsters because we were Catholics. I’d never realised up until that point that non-Catholics found us so fascinating. Now I’m a non-Catholic who finds Catholics fascinating. I made one friend in the village and I have happy memories of sitting in the stable behind her family’s cottage with her, and riding her horse down the High Street. I gift these experiences to Rebecca, too.

Like Rebecca, I was content most of the time I spent living in a rusty caravan on the land. We had a large vegetable garden, and chickens, and an old wooden railway carriage for storing furniture in. I enjoyed cycling around the beautiful local countryside and once I walked the whole ten miles into Lincoln just because I could. When I started my A’ Levels at college I learned to ride my dad’s moped. It cost 49p for a tankful of petrol! I had a Saturday job in town and once ran out of petrol a mile and a half from home. I had to push the moped all the way back to our village. I gift the moped for Rebecca to use when she moves from the caravan to live in Newtown Linford in Leicestershire, a place that also has a significance in my own background story, but that’s for another day.

Tracey, thank you – and I wish you every success with the new edition of the book, and many new readers. Here are the other stops on the blog tour…

About the author

Tracey is the author of four novels, The Last Time We Saw Marion, (2014) Of His Bones (stand-alone sequel to The Last Time We Saw Marion, 2017) and The Eliza Doll (2016).

Another Rebecca was originally published by Inspired Quill in 2015 but has been enhanced and has a beautiful new cover for its re-release in September 2018 by Wild Pressed Books. Tracey’s novels have been described as both poetic and painterly.

Tracey is also a poet and a visual artist. All her work is inspired by the emotions of her own experiences and perceptions. She has a Fine Art MA (University of Lincoln) and a BA Hons Visual Studies (Humberside Polytechnic). She has exhibited throughout the UK (as Tracey Scott). She is the editor and co-director of Wild Pressed Books. Most importantly, she is the mother of four grown-up children, who have astonished and inspired her.

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