Requiem

It is quiet in the early fields. A bell begins to toll for Mass, and from all over the village dogs set up their barking. A priest in his long skirts stands on the steps of the church. People are coming, clutching their missals. The priest goes inside. He is old.

Latecomers shuffle in the porch. Men in their shirtsleeves stand leaning on the glass at the back of the church. Their shadows hunch about. The voices of the faithful rumble after the priest. A baby’s hand taps on the glass.

Outside the streets are empty. A rook on a post clucks to itself and squawks down, loud-beaked, to its fellows.

Requiem began as a short story, and was my first piece of writing as an adult. It was broadcast on BBC Radio Sheffield in 1988, and hearing it read aloud was one of the most exciting things that has happened to me as a writer. From that moment I was determined to make writing my career.

Some time later I wrote an extended version of Requiem as a play for BBC Radio 4, and it was first broadcast in 1993. It was part fiction, part autobiography, about an adolescent girl attending a convent school, and the crippling effect of the taunts of one particular nun on her life.

Soon after that I began to write the adult novel, Requiem, and although the girl at the convent school remained at the heart of it, I developed it into a story of a girl in rural Ireland who is imprisoned not just by her religion but by her family, and her search for her real identity becomes the driving narrative of the novel. Throughout she is obsessed with the memory of that nun’s taunt to her, that she cannot live up to her namesake – Cecilia, martyr and virgin, patron saint of music. For me, it is the most personal and important book I have written, and I was very disappointed when the publishers allowed it to go out of print.