Analysis of The Face

I wrote this story The Face at one sitting. It was late at night. My girlfriend at the time (now my wife) may have been asleep, or out - I can't remember. But I remember her reading it the next morning and telling me that, unlike the other stories I had shown her, this one was complete. I felt pleased. Then she pointed out things which were wrong with it. Then I rewrote it.

The story is based on a personal experience, but of course it departs from that. I do remember (vaguely) my father, who was a miner, waking me up and telling me that I wasn't going to school that morning, I was going to work with him. Why I had to go to work with him, and why my mother wasn't at home, I don't know. She might have been in hospital, or maybe she had gone to visit one of her sisters in Craigmillar (a poor district of Edinburgh). All I know is that my father took me down the pit he worked in, before it closed. The pit (in a village called Rosewell) was closed shortly after this, so my memory is correct to that extent. Remembering the experience is something else.

We tend to assume that our memories are like books on a shelf, or DVDs in a rack, and we can simply choose one and read it or play it, but memory is more complex. When we remember an experience in the sense of reliving it, we have to imagine it, because our memories are usually fragmentary, and when we imagine it, we enter the realm of fiction. So in order to describe this remembered experience in words, I found that I had to start making things up immediately, partly because my memory for detail is not great. All I could really remember of this experience was walking down into a dark tunnel, the water dripping from the roof, my father making me walk on my own, and quite an intense feeling of fear. I have learned, as a writer, that memories which carry an emotional charge are often worth exploring. Perhaps this is because, when we experience a heightened emotional state, we have a heightened awareness and take in more of what is happening. And such experiences leave their marks on us. But my memory of this experience remained somewhat vague, because of the nature of the experience: walking down a dark tunnel didn't offer many specific details. It was just very scary for me at the time. Still I think it is possible to be faithful to the essence of an experience, even if you have make up a great deal to do so.

The question of why my father took me down the pit, and the memory of feeling very afraid, combined to make me write the story. I brought in other memories from around the same period in my life: going to a boxing gym; my father having to tell a woman that her husband had died that day in the pit; my mother and father kissing when some terrible misfortune like that came about ( the only other time I remember seeing them kissing was at Christmas); the mental 'games' I played as a child, repeating a word over and over again until it lost its meaning, until the sound became a thing in itself. Many people who have read the story or have heard me read it have told me that they did exactly the same thing with words as children.

Drawing on personal experience for writing can present certain difficulties. I sometimes feel: this was just a trivial thing which happened to me, so why should anyone else be interested in it? I have learnt to overcome that, because I have come to realise that if I write about something from my own experience vividly enough, other people will be able to relate to it. I have also learnt that in writing about something apparently trivial it is sometimes possible to get at something bigger, to step into a broader thematic territory, in this case to do with such things as: initiation into the adult world; father-son relationships; how people cope with death when it visits their community; fear of the unknown; the very nature of fear itself. At least, these were some of the things I thought I was trying to explore by means of this story about a young boy being taken down a mine.

Then there is the question of whether we must stay with what actually happened, or what we remember of it. I think it is important to feel that I can depart from the experience to suit the demands of the story, which is exactly what happened with this story. Though it is firmly based on an experience, I thought it would be more interesting if the boy in the story believes that he might encounter a human face when goes down the pit, rather than 'the coal face'. I was a naive and imaginative child, but I think I knew that when miners spoke about 'the face', they were talking about the coal face. Perhaps I made the boy in the story more naive than I was, in that this is something he clearly doesn't understand, but really I harboured many similar misunderstandings as a boy, and often took words very literally the way children do, so he is not so far removed from me. Without that central fictional element, however, this remembered experience could not have become the stuff of fiction - it would have remained on the level of memoir or autobiography.

The formal challenge for me in this story was to present a young boy's point of view, with all the misunderstandings, questions and mental chaos that entails, and to present this very subjective viewpoint within a rather harsh objective context of central Scotland circa 1960, and pits closing. I wanted to present the boy's point of view in a very intense way, so it was important to get into the boy's thought-pattern, the rhythm of his speech, and to find the thought patterns and rhythms which would convey his fear. At the same time, it felt right to come out of this at the end of the story and present a short, more neutral or 'objective' scene, in which the father and son have a brief, rather laconic conversation, in which the boy looks at the pit as a place where men work, which might close down - in short, he has become more aware of it as a public reality, whereas the father has been reminded of something much more personal, his own emotional life, when the son says that he saw the face of John Ireland, the father's dead friend. In terms of the narrative, the father in the story is trying to teach his son something, trying to initiate him into something, but I very much wanted the son to teach the father something at the end of the story too, or at least to shock him into speechlessness and make him question the reality he knows.

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