Synopsis of Memoir: The Black Pencil Woman: A portrait of my mother

 THE BLACK PENCIL WOMAN – ROS HOLLAND (WESTON)

JACKET intro
The Black Pencil Woman is Ros Holland’s highly personal memoir of her life and family, centred around her parents and sparked by her mother’s death. Her mother was the black pencil woman of the book’s title, slim and chic in her customary stiletto heels. Her father, whom Ros adored, died when Ros was ten, and her mother’s overwhelming grief coloured Ros’s early life in unexpected ways, which she examines with calm, almost brutal, honesty. Through an experimental narrative that roams freely, from the First World War and the hardships of a Northumberland mining community in the 1930s, to the post-war rehabilitation wards of a 1950s hospital and the stark reality of a murder in the 1960s, Holland explores the rawness of childhood bereavement, and all the joys and sorrows of family life. The voices of many characters chime in to tell their stories in their own way, in a heart-rendingly accurate portrayal of grief and growth, merged with a powerful social document of the lives of working-class men and women in the north east of England in the early twentieth century.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Ros Holland has had a career in education, including working as a special needs teacher before becoming a lecturer and researcher in Education and Health Education at Southampton University. She was the UK Co-ordinator for the Europe Against Cancer Programme while at Southampton University. Ros now runs her own psychotherapy practice in Salisbury and writes and edits for the Cochrane Collaboration among others.

BACK OF JACKET QUOTE

To understand the ‘me’ and ‘I’, I have had to free my memory; free the myths so that the legend, the story, can be told as well as it might after such a long time. My perception of my family history will shape this story. Our story is rooted in how we (along with many others) designed and used landscape: the rustic versus the industrial story. How in that landscape we developed culture and subcultures until landscape and culture were inextricable. My great-grandparents and grandparents worked the land and its mineral content to provide them with a living, and their values shaped their children’s values. Hard work and independence were passed from generation to generation along with a love of the rural and a tolerance of the industrial: canny companions.