I never followed up on that, and I’m rather glad I didn’t.

This was in the really low point of my career, just before I did Valley of Lights. Basically the idea was that ‘we editors will thrash out the ideas and send you away to write them up.’ I then began to rewrite and polish, and I remember I got a letter from a fairly prominent editor at the time, which advised me that I should not spend time on this book and should not follow the path that I was following, and perhaps if I would go down and have a meeting with this editor and another senior editor, we could thrash out a few ideas. So in a way, I was kind of glad of the illness, as it had given something as well as taken something away. It didn’t hang together, it didn’t plot properly, it didn’t make any sense, but, there was some really bizarre and wonderful stuff in there.

Afterwards I came back and read it, and realised that no well person could ever have written it. I did the first draft of Boat House under the influence of the virus. I think I had two weeks in bed and was then back at work again. Hepatitis is like a six month disease to get over. So I was sort of going the ten yards to the study every morning and plopping in the chair and carrying on working. Of course being freelance, I didn’t have a job to knock off and get sick pay from.

The liver said, I’m taking a holiday now, you carry on without me. I also picked up hepatitis while I was over there! Within a couple of months of coming home it incubated and then whoom! That was it, you know. I went over to Leningrad in 1984, did the research in the city there, and picked up a lot of useful facts. I’ve been working on it since about 1984. She is looking to find herself a place in British society, and the way that she does it is to find work in the restaurant trade in the north-west of England, in Cumbria, which is an area where I set Chimera, and which I’m returning to now because I love the landscape up there.īut, of course, what happens is that she brings with her the psychoses which were fostered in the prison hospital, where she went in a sane person and came out a not-quite-so-sane person, because the regime in the prison hospitals of the time was such that that was the situation it engendered. Stephen Gallagher: The Boat House is set in Leningrad and the Lake District and is the story of a young woman from Russia who, in the pre-Glasnost era spent time in the prison psychiatric hospital in Leningrad, and who now – in the post-Glasnost era – has been able to leave Russia, and has entered Britain as an illegal immigrant.

Valley of Lights by Stephen Gallagher