The third story in my short story collection Remember Me To The Bees is Singing For Seals. I wrote it to explore how a child might react to a traumatic experience. After a few re-writes the point of view shifted from the daughter to the father, Damien, who is trying to fix his family after a miscarriage has torn it apart.

By focusing on the father’s promise to his daughter and his determination to win back her trust, this becomes a far more hopeful and less bleak story than it might have been.

The artwork is by Louise Boulter.

A short excerpt from Singing for Seals

It roared before us, the colour of slate with streaks of violent green, waves like huge animals leaping to smash themselves against the glassy black rocks. The air rang with pellets of water and the storm whipped around us, pulling at Carrie’s skirt and dragging Aylene’s tired curls free from her tur- quoise headscarf.
“Where are the seals?” Carrie asked, “I can’t see them.”

“Maybe they’re sheltering in a cave.” I wished I hadn’t made yet another stupid promise.

“But you said! You told me I would see them!” Carrie scowled. The disappointment was as vivid on her face as it had been after the night of bloodied sheets, when I’d sat her down and explained that the baby was no longer coming. She’d wanted to know what had gone wrong, why she wasn’t going to be a big sister after all. There was nothing I could say to that; I just hugged her and promised that everything would be better soon.

But I’d lied. Months passed and Aylene was still the frozen stranger she’d become when the baby died inside her.

“You said the seals would be here!”

“We have to sing to them,” I said desperately. “They’ll like that, they’ll swim to shore to listen. Let’s sing ‘All Things Bright And Beautiful’ good and loud. I know you learnt it at school.”

We shouted the words into the churning air, and after a few moments even Aylene joined in with the chorus.

Then I heard it: a frail, screeching cry that cut through the storm like a distress signal.
“Hush a moment. What’s that sound?”

Aylene’s hands closed tightly over Carrie’s shoulders, and I looked at her pinched face, eyes half-closed against the rain as she listened.

“Is it seals?” Carrie asked, excitement bringing her to the tips of her welly boots.

“I’m not sure.” I glanced down the rocks to a dark hole; a cave. “It came from over there. Stay here with your mum, I’m going to see.”

The second story in my debut short story collection Remember Me To the Bees is The Big Clean. An earlier version was published by The View From Here literary magazine. The artwork is by Louise Boulter.

I’ve always been interested in the way different people’s minds work, and at what point those differences become defined as madness. This story takes the point of view of a small boy who is witnessing his mother’s latest ‘episode’ and worrying about how his dad will react when he gets home.

In an homage to earlier tales of women’s madness, such as the outstanding The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the story also contains echoes of the understated sexism of yesteryear.

A short excerpt from The Big Clean

Mum’s gone mad again. That’s why I’m sitting in the tree house. It’s just a few planks of wood nailed together, but it feels safe up here. When the wind blows the branches creak and I imagine I’m on a boat sailing far away. We had an astronomy lesson at Scouts today, so I can use my telescope to navigate by the stars.

Dad’s not home yet, but when he gets back from work I know he’s going to go mad too, not in a crazy way, like Mum, but in a shouty, angry way.

He hates it when Mum gets like this. I wouldn’t mind her madness so much if it wasn’t for the way it makes Dad so cross. Sometimes when she’s mad Mum’s magic to be around. The usual rules disappear and life becomes a game. I never quite know what to expect. Right now though, she’s busy digging up the garden and filling the house with soil. She’s doing it ever so thoroughly, sprinkling a fine layer of earth over every single thing and making the whole house smells damp and dusky, like a cellar. She calls it “the big clean”.

When I walked into the kitchen earlier, she told me to be careful not to get dirty footprints on her nice clean floor, so I tiptoed across the soil to the counter and tried to open the biscuit tin without tipping any of the chocolate-brown mud off. I couldn’t do it though, and half of it fell on the floor in a heap, but Mum just smiled brightly, passed me a custard cream and layered the earth back on top of the tin.

Ever wondered where a writer gets their ideas from? It’s something I’m often asked about, so over the next 20 weeks I thought I’d offer you a bit of an insight.

As you may know, the official launch of my short story collection, Remember Me To The Bees, is going to happen in March, and over the coming weeks, I’ll introduce each of the 20 short stories in turn, let you know the inspiration behind them and share a short extract to hopefully whet your appetite.

The first story in the collection is Never Seen The Sea, which tells the story of Sally, who, funnily enough, has never seen the sea. The original seed of it was me trying to imagine how the sea would look to someone who’d never laid eyes on it before, and then I started thinking of the reasons someone might never have had the opportunity to see it for themselves. Living on a tiny island like Britain, it’s a difficult thing to grasp!

I also wanted to think about how not having experienced a thing most people take for granted might colour an individual’s personality – how it might set them apart.

An earlier version of Never Seen The Sea was published in The Love of Looking, an anthology from Scopophilia Publishing, and led directly to me being offered the chance to have my debut collection published.

In case you were wondering, the artwork is by Louise Boulter.

A short excerpt from Never Seen The Sea

Gusts of air buffeted the Fiat as they raced along the motorway. Sally fought the urge to open the window and hang her head out, mouth agape. She’d never felt anything like it before, this sense of wild abandon. No one knew where she was, not even her mother, no one but this man, Paul, this almost stranger, driving the car and her towards the sea.

“So, you’ve never been there?” He’d been disbelieving at first, half watching the road and half gazing at her in what she supposed was amazement. “Not even as a small child?”

“Never,” she said defiantly, for the first time feeling the power in that statement. Rather than flushing with shame, as she usually did when the topic came up, she felt the novelty of her innocence, saw the way he stared into her, a girl who needed educating. She saw the yearning in his cloudy blue eyes when he contemplated being the one to reveal it to her, as though he was showing her the world.