Author's Notes: Tom Bullough

Mar 22 2008

Tom Bullough, long listed for Wales Book of the Year, explains how Wordsworth and an obscure optical device inspired his novel

I CAME across the key idea in my novel, the Claude Glass, in Wordsworth: A Life by Juliet Barker.

The great poet, she writes, had a particular loathing for the sort of tourist who would descend on his beloved Lake District and inspect its views in a Claude glass: a small black convex mirror, which would distort a scene to look like a “picturesque” painting.

“It seems wholly appropriate,” Barker observes, “that… (the user) had to turn his back on the real living landscape in order to see its image reflected in miniaturised form and neatly contained in the mirror’s frame.”

For William Wordsworth, to come to nature with such preconceived ideas was an action bordering on the criminal.

In all 992 pages of Wordsworth: A Life I highlighted only this paragraph, but my original intention had been to find information about Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy’s visits to Radnorshire (my native county) in the early 19th Century.

At the time, I was living in a three-room cottage near Hay-on-Wye – two fields from the nearest track and with no running water besides what came through the roof.

I was trying to assemble my ideas for the Radnorshire-based story that would ultimately become the Claude Glass, but most of the time I spent floundering through mud, filling cracks in the walls and working at a nearby sawmill, and it was several months before I thought to look at Wordsworth: A Life again.

I tend to be quite a seasonal writer, and find nothing so inspiring as spring, the coming of orchids and bluebells, and not being cold and wet any more. So it was this particular year, when it finally stopped raining and, in the newly light evenings, I was able to walk on the common land behind my cottage. Already, I had the bones of the Claude Glass in place.

The book is the story of two small boys living on neighbouring hill farms in Radnorshire in the early 1980s. One, Robin, is the son of English immigrants – former hippies who came to Wales with an idealistic vision and find themselves mired in the harsh realities of farming.

The other, Andrew, is the son of a local couple alienated from the village community, who live in four filthy rooms of a once-grand house and neglect him so badly that, even aged seven, he is almost mute and sleeps with the sheepdogs as much as he sleeps indoors.

They are an unlikely pair to strike up a friendship, but with few other children in these hard, bare hills soon Robin becomes Andrew’s first regular human companion.

It was up on the common land, admiring the evening sunshine, that I remembered Wordsworth and his Claude glass-carrying tourists.

Suddenly I knew that I had to include this obscure optical device. I hurried back down the hill to Wordsworth: A Life. What if, I thought, Andrew were to find a Claude glass in one of the abandoned rooms of his parents’ house? What if – better still – that house had once belonged to the Hutchinsons: a branch of the Wordsworth family who lived for 16 years at Hindwell Farm, near Old Radnor?

Although some readers have described the Claude Glass as the story of Robin’s family, for me the heart of the book has always been Andrew. He is two degrees short of a feral child, and has come to acquire some animal characteristics himself.

In one of the first successful passages I wrote, he is huddled in the barn during a thunderstorm, howling along with the sheepdogs. Andrew is a desperate, tragic character but, like a feral child, he also holds a certain romantic appeal.

The Claude glass, then, represents a conflict between ideals and reality. Robin’s family are fighting the weather and the infertility of the Welsh soil – propelled by a dream of the purity, “the nakedness of hill farming”.

Andrew, however, has had quite enough purity already. When he finds a Claude glass in the ruined ballroom of his parents’ house, he is just beginning his first real friendship.

For him, the “little mirror” means quite the reverse of what it meant to Wordsworth.

To Andrew, it is not some denial of a greater reality, but a vital, fragile and ultimately human way of seeing.

The Claude Glass is published by Sort of Books