Christopher Rush has been focussing recently on historical novels detailing the lives of artistic greats such as Chopin and Shakespeare. His latest novel tells the story of the love affair between Thomas Hardy and his first wife, Emma Gifford. We caught up with Chris to ask about his life and influences.

When I Set Out For Lyonesse
By Christopher Rush
Published by Sparsile Books

Where were you born?  

St Monans, East Neuk of Fife, 1944.

What is your first memory?  

In my childhood memoir, A Twelvemonth and a Day I have recorded many infant memories, including being pulled out of the sea after falling into the harbour, aged two, and being given brandy and water, which my great-great-aunt Elspeth assured the family would set me on the road to ruin. I may be ruined but am still here. 

Did you enjoy school? Did you have a favourite teacher or subject?  

I did not enjoy Primary School, with its thrashings, its emphasis on facts and on rote learning, and its total lack of appeal to the imagination. The first four years of my secondary schooling were little better, thanks to a sadistic French teacher and an hysterical Maths teacher, who couldn’t understand my total inability to comprehend mathematics. All this changed in 1959 when the Scottish Renaissance poet Alastair Mackie joined the staff at Waid Academy Anstruther. He and his fellow Aberdonian Alastair Leslie taught me English and opened my mind to English and Scots literature.

Do you remember when and how you decided to become a writer?

This was also in 1959, when I was 15. An educational failure so far, I had filled in forms to join the navy, and was sitting glumly alone in the house in front of a twelve-inch black and white Bush television set which was permanently switched on, and feeling not only a  failure but a huge disappointment to my mother, who had had high hopes for me, and whom I had let down. And then it happened. A film came on, starting with a voice-over, which said: ‘This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.’ It was the Laurence Olivier film of Hamlet. I was transfixed. I begged the school Rector to let me repeat my fourth year, in which I was inspired by my English teachers and by other gifted schoolmasters. I knew that although academia was the next step, I yearned to become a writer. 

Did you read newspapers growing up? How do you get your news now?

Newspapers held no interest for me. Books were what mattered. Later, in adult life, I used to watch Channel Four News, but following the retiral of Jon Snow, gave up.

What was your favourite childhood holiday?  

My father was a Middlesbrough man who was conscripted into the navy during the war, and was drafted up to a naval base near Crail in Fife, H.M. S. Jackdaw. There he met my mother and begot me. So very occasionally I was taken on the old steam train, before it was axed by Dr Beeching, to visit the Yorkshire branch of the family. There was nowhere else to go. Money was tight. The real holiday was the Glasgow Fair, when waves of visitors came by train to St Monans, eager for cheap accommodation, which our mums were only too glad to provide for the sake of a few extra bob, cash in the paw. And so St Monans remained my main holiday place, enlivened by the wonderful presence of girls. Glasgow girls. 

What is your favourite place now?

I haven’t had a holiday for a while. If I could afford it I’d choose a foothold in my fishing-village home. The best I can do is drive over there for the day.

Did you go to university? What is your abiding memory of that time?

I read English Language and Literature at Aberdeen University, 1964-1968. Gaudeamus Igitur? Yes, I rejoiced, both academically and socially, working hard and playing hard. Highlights were: lectures by Professor George Ian Duthie, an Elizabethan expert; strolling on the long dunes by the North Sea; rolling home to student bedsits in the wee sma’ ‘oors;  and the exhilarating experience of sitting ten Final Honours papers, crammed into the last week of term, six hours each day, every day, with a break for lunch, and afterwards lying sloshed in a communal bath of hot soapy water and cold Whitbread beer, singing rude rugby songs with my fellow scholars. Them was the days, Joxer!

What was your first job?

After graduation I was offered a Research Fellowship at Peterhouse Cambridge, which I turned down. My first job was to be an assistant librarian in the Music Room of the Edinburgh Central Library on George IV Bridge.

After Moray House I entered the teaching profession and taught English in Edinburgh for 30 years.

Other than writing, what has been your favourite job?

Writing apart, I loved schoolmastering in the glory days before education become bureaucratised by a gang of civil servants who turned schools into the education industry. It used to be a joy to walk into your classroom and feel free to teach your pupils as you knew best, and to learn from them, instead of ticking boxes and applying a load of invented external criteria. 

What is your favourite film?

With apologies to the life-changing Olivier Hamlet, it has to be the Russian Hamlet, starring Innokentii Smoktunovsky. 

What is your favourite meal?

Nostalgia. In the form of fish and chips eaten out of a newspaper on the pier at Anstruther.

What is your favourite album or song?

Other than the entire field of classical music, my favourite popular album would be Jake in a Box featuring the wittily entertaining pieces of the Yorkshire songster, Jake Thackeray. All good fun, along with a dash of sadness, as in ‘Down at the Black Swan’.

How do you exercise?  

After a lifetime of hill-running and marathons, my favourite exercise is now reaching for the nearest glass.

Do you have a favourite word?

Churchill’s motto: Keep Buggering On

Which writers have influenced you over your life?  

Shakespeare. And also the medieval Scots makars, Henryson and Dunbar et al.

What are you reading now?  

I tend to read what I’m writing about, by way of research. Occasionally I’ll be given a gift of a book. For the last Father’s Day I received a copy of the recent memoir by Anthony Hopkins, and was charmed to learn that he too had been a failure at school until a certain film changed his life: the Olivier Hamlet! Ten years later he was working with Olivier. I can’t compete, except to say that Sir Ben Kingsley has now commissioned a Hollywood writer/producer to produce a feature film of my Shakespeare novel, Will. Hope springs infernal!

When I Set Out For Lyonesse by Christopher Rush is published by Sparsile Books, priced £22.99.