Transcript

Jo: Hello Travelers. I’m Jo Frances Penn, and today I’m here with LK Wilde. Welcome, Laura.

Laura: Hello. Thank you for having me.

Jo: It’s great to have you on. So little introduction. Laura is the award-winning author of historical fiction, romance, and uplifting feel-good fiction. Her novel Silver Darlings is set on the Northumberland Island of Lindisfarne, also known as Holy Island, here in England, which we are talking about today. So just to get us started.

Where is Lindisfarne? How big is it? What makes it so special?

Laura: It’s quite a famous place considering how small it is. It is off the coast of Northumberland, which for those who don’t know, it’s probably about halfway between Newcastle and Edinburgh.

It’s really close to the Scottish border, and it’s a tidal island, so you can get across twice a day, there’s a road to drive across and it’s about eight or nine miles round, and there’s a population about 150. So you’ve got a very small village in one tiny corner of the island and then a big nature reserve. But it’s got quite an important historical significance considering when you look on a map, it’s a tiny little pinprick.

Jo: It is really small. And so you said the eight or nine miles, just so people know, you can easily walk around that?

Laura: You could. There’s not a path all the way around, so you’d have to do a bit of scrambling over rocks and things. But yes, you could definitely walk around it.

Jo: As you said, really near the borders. And when I was there, only briefly, which we’ll come back to, but on that one side you are looking towards the coast of England. On the other side, what do you see looking off the other side?

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Laura: You can see the Farne Islands, which are a cluster of islands a bit further down the coast. And then a lot of sea.

Jo: Exactly. And that’s the way the Vikings came, right?

Laura: Yes. And I think you can still almost get that a bit in the accent. It’s quite unique. The accent on the island is a real mixture of Newcastle and Northeast and Scottish and they have their own words and things. I wonder how much influence from Scandinavian is in there too.

Jo: That’s interesting. Do you speak that accent?

Laura: No. I had to get a narrator to record the audiobook for me because I’ve tried, and when I went to school there, everyone used to say “Aye” instead of “Yes” when you did the register. And for me, with my very obvious Southern accent, it was so embarrassing.

Jo: It’s great that you mention the accent because, for people listening who aren’t English or from the UK, it’s not that far. From where I am in Bath and you are in Cornwall, I mean, this is in our country and you can get there in a five or six hours train journey, I would think, and I was there and I also felt like an outsider with my accent. I didn’t really understand some of what people were saying, which really shocked me. I just wasn’t expecting that.

Laura: No, it’s so different. People used to talk about a “muckle bari gaji,” which would mean a very attractive young man, but it’s just a whole set of words I’d never heard of. There’s quite a lot of examples like that. It makes it a very unique place, I think.

Jo: I think that’s right. You said you went to school there, you lived there as a child. Tell us a bit about that.

What do you remember from that time?

Laura: So I moved there when I was 14 and I lived there till I was 18 and I was there with my younger sister and brother.

My memories are in two categories, either extremely positive or extremely negative. I think with the passage of time, you tend to forget the boring moments in your life.

But living there, there were no boring moments. It was either brilliant or terrible. And the good bits were amazing. The freedom of living somewhere like that. We’d come from a city, so there, we had our door open all the time. People would just come in and out as they wanted to.

We could go off in the morning and my mom was fine with us coming back late at night and my brother was seven. So for him especially to have that freedom was really incredible. It’s for a relatively short period in my life. It’s probably the most significant group of years, I would say. Because it’s such a unique experience to live somewhere like that.

Not just the remoteness, but everything that comes with island life.

Jo: Well let’s get into that. So the freedom you said and the safety of being there, and I guess the natural side of things, but as a teenager, between the ages of 14 and 18, what were some of those negatives?

Laura: Well, I think the main negative was when we weren’t on the island. There’s a primary school there and when we first arrived, all the national press came up because my brother was the only pupil in the school, and it was all in the papers that he was saving the island school.

But for me and my sister, we would be picked up on a Monday morning outside our house with our suitcases and we’d be taken to a hostel in Berwick-upon-Tweed, the nearest town, and we would be there until the taxi came on Friday afternoon to take us home. So we effectively had to leave home. And it wasn’t like being in a boarding school where you’d have all that support. There were two wardens, but they had their own flats. You didn’t really see them. And it was a building that had been built for 30 to 40 kids. But by the time we were there, there were only five of us.

So there were whole sections of this building that were shut off. And actually it was so bad that we were the last kids to be part of that setup. After us, they changed the system so kids would go to a local boarding school where they’d have all that support.

Jo: Well, I think, I mean, really what you’re talking about, it sounds like the middle of nowhere. And that’s what’s so interesting because it is, Northumberland really does have a lot of remote areas, but it feels like you said Berwick-on-Tweed, it’s not that far to Edinburgh from there. So you weren’t in the middle of nowhere. But let’s, coming back to the island itself. So you mentioned island life.

What does island life mean?

Laura: I think it means very different things depending on why you are there. Which group you fall into.

So there’s the religious community there and we were there because my dad was a church minister and he was sent there to – there was a church which had had no members anymore, and his job was to turn it into a visitor center. So we fell between these two groups where you had the religious community and then you had the everyday islanders who would do work in hospitality or fishing, or all sorts of other things. So I think within this one, very small community, people are living extremely different experiences.

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