Thirty-One Inches

The pea-shooter is thirty-one inches of hollow brass. Ada measured it once, for no reason she could name.

That line is the first indication in the novel that Ada is the kind of person she is: someone who does a precise, practical thing, measures an object she has used for thirty years, and cannot account for the impulse. She is not sentimental about the pea-shooter. She does not, in the novel's first chapter, think about whose it was before hers or what it means to be carrying it. She just carries it. The measurement is a fact she now has, filed alongside the other facts she keeps about the route.

Writing a novel around an object requires a particular discipline: the object must never explain itself. The moment a writer points at a thing and says notice this, the thing stops working. It becomes a symbol, which is a kind of dead object, still and labelled, not moving through the world anymore. The pea-shooter in this novel is not a symbol. It is a brass tube that Ada uses to blow dried peas at bedroom windows. The reader may make of it whatever they make of it. The novel will not assist them.

What it can do is place the object, precisely and repeatedly, so that it is always in the right position when it needs to be.

First line of the novel: the pea-shooter is on its hook. Ada lifts it. She goes out.

Last scene of the novel: the pea-shooter is in a nine-year-old boy's hands.

Between these two points, the pea-shooter appears in nearly every one of Ada's chapters. It is there when she lifts it in the dark. It is there when she pauses outside number sixteen and decides on one tap rather than three. It is there in the small comic scene where Joe holds it for the first time in the cold October street and Ada tells him: the trick is not to think about being warm. It is there on the hook on Christmas Day, when Ada does not go out because it is Sunday and there is no mill work, and it is simply there, on its hook, in a house that is oddly quiet.

The pea-shooter was Thomas's. He died thirty-odd years before the novel begins. Ada picked it up the morning after he died, having never done the job once in her life, and went out. Whether this was courage or avoidance is a question the novel asks once, obliquely, and does not answer. Ada does not answer it. The reader supplies the answer, and in doing so supplies something about themselves.

Writing objects this way, with total fidelity and without explanation, is one of the disciplines that northern English fiction at its best has always understood. The object is not analogous to feeling. It does not represent feeling. It is simply there, in the room, and feelings happen to be present too, and the reader may connect them if they wish. A kitchen range. A letter on a windowsill. A hat bought to say goodbye to someone. A yellow curtain at a window where the wrong curtains are. These are the facts of the novel. The facts do not mean anything. The reader does the meaning.

This sounds easier than it is. The hardest thing in writing this kind of prose is the restraint required: the not-underlining, the not-explaining, the not-reaching for the metaphor that would make it clear. Clarity of this kind is actually a kind of opacity. The novel is plain on its surface and asks the reader to do the depth work. Some readers find this rewarding. Some find it withholding. That line runs through almost every piece of literary fiction that refuses to summarise its own meaning, and it seems right to acknowledge it rather than pretend the choice comes without costs.

What it gains is this: when the pea-shooter passes from Ada's life to Joe's hands in the novel's final pages, the reader who has been watching it for two hundred pages brings everything the object has accumulated, all of Ada's mornings, all of the route, all of the things Ada has never said about Thomas and the thirty-odd years and what a life amounts to, and none of this needs to be stated. The writer does not write and so the pea-shooter passed into new hands, carrying with it the weight of a life well spent. The writer writes something much smaller. The pea-shooter is in Joe's hands. Joe is at the door of number sixteen, which is now the right house for it to be at. First light.

The novel does not tell you how to feel. It puts you in a position where you cannot help but feel it.

A few practical notes on the research. The pea-shooter, as a knocker-upper's tool, was real and in use in east Lancashire cotton towns well into the twentieth century. The dried peas were bought in bulk from the market, a pound or so a week for a route of eighty-odd houses, at roughly sixpence a pound. The pea against glass makes a specific sound: small, precise, not alarming. Hard to confuse with anything else at four in the morning. The brass was cold to hold in winter. Ada tucks her hands in her pockets between houses, which is not the most efficient way of managing the cold but is the way she has always done it.

The measurement, thirty-one inches, is not symbolic. It is thirty-one inches because that is roughly the length that would feel right in a woman's hands for this particular work: long enough to give the pea velocity and direction, short enough to use accurately in the dark without resting it against a wall. Whether Ada's pea-shooter is exactly thirty-one inches is something only Ada knows, and she knows it because she measured it once, for no reason she could name.

She has not measured it since. The fact is simply there, filed alongside the other facts, waiting for whatever use it might be put to.