Today is 12th October. On this day in history, the Battle of Hatfield Chase in 632 led to the death of Edwin of Deira, the first Christian king of Northumbria. It was also the birthdate of Edward VI, the son that Henry VIII hoped would save the Tudor dynasty. In 1979, it was the publication day of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and in 1989, the day the Grand Hotel in Brighton was bombed by the IRA during the Conservative Party Conference. And now I can reveal, it is the birthday of Jason Boyd, the main character in the young adult novel I have been working on for the past few years.
Of course, this is completely irrelevant to anybody else on the planet other than me. It is never mentioned in the novel itself, and how I came to select that date is a personal detail that I don’t plan on explaining. It is simply part of the back story development that built the character, but since I worked it out, the day has taken on a new significance that no-one else would appreciate.
Dates in fiction can be as significant or insignificant as the author chooses. I love those 19th Century novels where dates are glossed over with an ambiguous dash as if it were some great secret that needed to be redacted. On the other hand, if a novel is based on true events, dates need to be absolutely accurate or the author risks scorn and derision. Like geographical locations, these details can be checked – very easily these days. (Not that I checked the dates at the start of this blog – I found the information on a website called http://www.beautifulbritain.co.uk and took their word for it that the dates are accurate. If they’re not, blame them!)
At the very least, novels need to be set in particular time period. In The Most Beloved Boy, the novel came to life when I decided on a historical setting, realising that the conventions of Victorian society made certain parts of the story make more sense. But the Victorian period lasted over sixty years, and there were vast social changes between the beginning and the end of that Queen’s reign. It felt necessary to be more specific, but when? In the end, I opted for 1871, as it was nicely in the middle, and it meant I could include a journey through the Suez Canal – officially opened in 1869. However, this wasn’t meant to be a historical novel as such, and I will admit that my historical research was the bare minimum, just enough (hopefully) to add to the atmosphere and avoid anachronisms. Historical fiction, as a genre, is great, but I don’t think of my work as belonging to it, despite the historical settings; to me, the story and characters are more important, and the time period merely a frame. In my other 19th Century-set novel, The Hawthorn Bride, I went for a later decade, but don’t ever specify in the story what the year is. The events of the novel are only important to the inhabitants of the small village where all the action takes place, while the events of the wider world barely touch them. Leaving it vague and unspecified seemed appropriate, putting the reader into their world.
After the Rain had to be more grounded in real dates as it used the end of the First World War as a starting point. Even if I hadn’t chosen this very real and well-known event to play a major role in the plot, no novel set in the first half of the 20th Century can over-look the influence of the two major wars on life. Knowing that my male protagonist had fought in WWI, I had to decide on his age in 1914 in order to establish what he had been doing before the war, and then work out his age in 1921, when he first appears. But I never worked out his birthday. I suppose I could have done, but it never felt necessary. It was only when writing Jay for Novel Number Six that I felt the need to pin down his actual birthday.
Maybe the reason for doing it this time is because Jay is of my generation. The novel is set at the end of 1980s, going into 1990, dates that I chose very specifically because they are contemporaneous with my own life. This isn’t history – I can remember these dates! Like my characters, I was at secondary school at this time, and I have used my own experiences and recollections to shape the novel. Jay and his friends are the third cohort to take the GCSE exams, putting them in the school year below me. That is significant to the story, as are some of the other details I have included. I haven’t put too many in; I didn’t want to overload the narrative with nostalgic references from my youth, and there were things going on in the world that perhaps I should have put in but didn’t. But Jay’s birthday, no matter how insignificant it was to the plot, felt like something I wanted to know. I knew that Jay would have got his GCSE results on Thursday 23rd August 1990, at the age of sixteen. From there, I decided that he would have turned sixteen in 1989, fixing on 12th October as the date. This also meant that he would have been born in the year 1973 – the same as me. Like me, 2024 would have marked his 51st birthday.
Is it weird to celebrate the birthday of a fictional character? Probably, but he feels real to me, so – Happy Birthday, Jay. Hopefully, it won’t be too much longer before you can meet him too, and then you might understand why it means so much to me.
M J Schofield 