There’s a note for the postman pinned to the front door of Marina Lewycka’s functional, foursquare house in the rowdy university quarter of Sheffield in northern England. “If no answer,” it says, “please put packages behind the wheelie bin. Don’t worry — they’re only foreign books.”
A blasé attitude to the new foreign editions of her bestselling first novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, that arrive with every post — it had been translated into 29 languages at the last count — but she has a simple explanation. “What thief would be interested in foreign books?” The Latvian edition has just arrived and looks suspiciously thin. “Are you sure they haven’t left bits out?” I ask her. “They might have done,” she says.
“The Russian edition is very short as well. I can read Russian a bit and it struck me as a bit of a slapdash translation. If you read Tolstoy in Russian it’s three times as long.” I start reading aloud the first paragraph of Tractors in Latvian. It is strangely like Latin. At least it is the way I pronounce it. “Do you know Latvian?” asks Lewycka, evidently impressed.
Lewycka, who was 58 when her life-transforming novel appeared three years ago, used to teach journalism and PR at Sheffield Hallam University, to which she is still attached in some vague, part-time, institution-boosting capacity. It quickly becomes apparent that she is a far better interviewer than I am and is soon asking me questions. She is the sort of person who, on first meeting, you feel you have known all your life. Funny, open, energised; a bit like her fiction. Readers must feel it, too — hence the 800 000 sales of Tractors in the United Kingdom and the remarkably ugly book awards (“What on earth can you do with a Nibbie?”) that litter her resolutely unmodernised kitchen.
So has this vast success after almost 40 years in pursuit of publication changed her life — if not her kitchen? She laughs. “It has in some ways. It was always my dream to be a writer, and obviously having your dream come true is fantastic. But there is something a bit terrible about it as well, because once your dream has come true what else is there? It was your dream and it becomes your job and then it’s not a dream any more.”
She also has to negotiate people’s idea of what a writer should be. “If I go out now wearing my old jogging trousers and trainers, with my hair looking wild, people know me, whereas they didn’t before. I was just another mad woman going down the road. They expect you to be witty or clever or profound and to have all sorts of opinions about things you have no idea about. It’s nice and very flattering, but a bit unreal. People have a perception of you as an author so you think, ‘I’d better try really hard to be an author.’ But what is an author? You try to become the person that people want you to be or expect you to be. What I enjoy more than anything is being with friends who knew me before all this happened and I can relax and go back to being that person.”
Before Tractors, the only creative work she had published was a poem in an Arts Council magazine about 30 years ago. Did she ever doubt that her dream would come true? “I doubted it all the time,” she says, “but writing was a compulsion. Lots of very good writers never get published, and that could easily have happened to me. People think that good writers will always come out in the end, but I don’t believe that.” She says she had reached the point where she barely discussed her writing with her husband, a mining consultant, or grown-up daughter. “When you’ve been doing it for as long as that, it gets a bit embarrassing, so you don’t talk about it very much.”
Lewycka, the daughter of two Ukrainians were been taken to Germany as forced labourers by the Nazis, was born in a British-run refugee camp in Germany in 1946. Her family settled in the UK soon afterwards. Tractors draws on her life — conflicts with her sister, the loss of her beloved mother, an eccentric engineer father who married again to a much younger woman, and his daughters’ schemes to oust the interloper.
How did her family feel about becoming material for a novel? “They were very generous about it, really,” she says. “I feel bad about my sister. It must be awful for her and I’d hate it if it happened to me. But you write about what you know. At least you start off by writing about what you know and then the worst thing is that you invent stuff and no one really knows what’s real and what’s invented. In the end you don’t even know yourself.”
Her original plan for Tractors was to write a memoir of her mother’s life. Before she died she made a tape of her recollections. “I started writing it,” she says, “but then I realised that there wasn’t enough on the tape. I just didn’t know enough, so I was going to have to make stuff up and, in a way, it was very liberating. If it had been my mother’s book it would have been pretty heavy and gloomy and sad, and not having to do that was very liberating.”
The defining feature of Lewycka’s writing is to treat serious themes — age, family conflict, the back story of war and grief and separation — in a comic way. Life’s a nightmare, but a hellishly funny one. She says it was the realisation that she could use humour in her books that was the key to unlocking what she had to say. “You get funnier as you get older, but I hadn’t connected with my sense of humour. I did for everyday purposes, but [before Tractors] I didn’t have the confidence to do it with what I wrote. Tractors felt like a last fling really. I thought, ‘What the hell? It doesn’t matter what I write. I’ll have a laugh and stick it on the internet.'”
She embarked on a creative writing course at Sheffield Hallam, polished what she had spent the best part of a decade writing and at the end of the course was approached by the external examiner, who also happened to be an agent, to see whether she wanted him to represent her. After 36 rejections (she has kept all the letters) for her previous work — two completed novels, poetry, short stories, romantic fiction — she bit his hand off.
Of her second novel, Two Caravans, she says she was keen to get the always tricky follow-up to a smash out of the way. “I just wanted to do it to prove to myself that I could. Number one was so overwhelming and I thought, ‘Gosh, I might never write anything ever again.’ I knew the second novel was traditionally the hardest one and that I’d probably get a lot of stick for it.”
In fact apart from a general dislike of the sections that are narrated by a dog — the book is ambitiously multi-layered — it was well received and now she can relax. The third book is well under way, a fourth is germinating and she gives the impression that she has plenty of time to fashion an oeuvre. When your father is still alive at 94, being 60 can still seem like a good time to begin.
Two Caravans has the same characteristic blend of comedy and desperation as her first book. It concerns a group of strawberry pickers drawn from several countries who fetch up in Kent, and traces their lives, loves and battle to survive. It is far less closely aligned to her own life than Tractors, but its starting point draws on an episode from her childhood when she and her mother worked as pea-pickers in Lincolnshire. “It was blissful,” she recalls. “You were out in the fields in the fresh air and I was with my mum and there was banter and camaraderie among the other pea-pickers. If someone had been looking in from the outside, they’d have said it was grossly exploitative, and no doubt it was, but it was still lovely, and I tried to get that across in Caravans.”
It is a pleasing irony that one language in which A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian has yet to appear is Ukrainian, though this is about to be rectified and a visit from the Ukrainian translator is imminent. Some Ukrainians were sniffy about the book, including the one who reviewed it in The Guardian back in March 2005 and found it a “banal tale” that crossed a “school textbook on Ukrainian history with … an episode of Coronation Street“.
“It has taken me a while to understand why he hated it so much,” says Lewycka, “but I think I do understand now. I’ve met a lot of Ukrainians since then. Before I wrote it, I didn’t know many Ukrainian Ukrainians. I knew a lot of Ukrainians who lived over here and they all thought it was a hoot. The Ukrainian Ukrainians are quite self-conscious about Ukraine as a country because it’s newly emerged on to the world stage.”
For her third book she promises that there will be “no Ukrainians and no vehicles”. She is coy about what will be in it. “It’s about anger and hate and I’m looking at Israel and Palestine quite a lot. But I don’t want to say too much.”–