Distant Voices. Barbara Erskine

       Preface

      When my first collection of short stories, Encounters, was published in 1990 I did not expect to be asked to compile a second, so I was enormously pleased to find myself writing some new stories, and making a further selection amongst my old ones, for Distant Voices.

      I still very much enjoy writing short stories. For me they are the sorbet between the courses of longer novels. They freshen and stimulate the palate. They indulge the writer’s and the reader’s whim with a quick glimpse into shadow or sunlight. They intrigue, they titillate, they frighten or they amuse.

      As in Encounters those stories that are not new have been chosen from more than two decades of writing and are very varied in theme. To select a few for comment or explanation might help to put the collection in context. Three of the stories, for example, A Test of Love, To Adam a Son and Flowers for the Teacher are unsophisticated and sentimental, written in the early seventies for the so-called true-life market, while others like Witchcraft for Today and When the Chestnut Blossoms Fall depict incidents in an older world where romance has grown a little cynical.

      There are of course ghost stories – two inspired by my own garden. The core story in Frost came from a sad tale told me about a greenhouse here, thankfully perhaps, now demolished; Rosemary and Thyme is based on an experience which I had myself whilst weeding in my herb garden one morning in early spring.

      Catherine’s Cat has laid to rest (or perhaps not?) a terror which haunted me for a while as a child and made bedtime a torment for many months – the suitcase on the wardrobe. The Duck Shoot Man was based on an incident which happened to my mother and my grandmother and myself when we paused on a journey to Edinburgh and spent the night on Lindisfarne.

      Dance Little Lady (purely imagination, this one!) was written in the brash eighties; The Toy Soldier (inspired by a toy we found in our cottage) in the more thoughtful nineties, a time of redundancy and re-evaluation.

      There are many more, about different times and different places, depicting different moods and both the strange and the mundane.

      Three of the stories are much longer than the others. Dance Little Lady, A Family Affair and Watch the Wall are almost novellas – two mini thrillers and one a historical romance – something to get your teeth into.

      Whatever the length and whatever the subject, I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.