Clare Chambers on the 'Hidden Man' Who Inspired Shy Creatures

It is often the case that a true story, or a small detail from a true story, can become the starting point for a novel. Perhaps this is because novelists are anxious creatures, who secretly doubt the validity of their chosen art form and feel that a grain of reality lends weight to the airy business of making things up. The banner ‘based on true events’ across a book jacket certainly seems to be regarded as a selling point and not an admission by the author of a lack of imaginative effort. For my part I find it a helpful shield behind which to cower. Surely no critic would dare to call a book far-fetched when one incident on page 34 is based on true events?

Both Small Pleasures and my new novel Shy Creatures were inspired by newspaper reports from the 1950s. In 2001 I caught the end of an interview on Radio 4 Woman’s Hour with the journalist Audrey Whiting, recalling the biggest scoop of her career – a story from the Sunday Pictorial about a woman who claimed her daughter was the result of a virgin birth. This seemed to me a novel crying out to be written. In the course of researching the 1950s for background, I came across an online newspaper archive searchable by date, region, keyword, etc, which proved a rich resource, full of wonders. 

Here, after many weeks of happy browsing, I came across the story of the Hidden Man, which became the springboard for Shy Creatures. In 1952, in Kingsdown, Bristol, Harry Tucker, a man in his forties, was discovered naked and dishevelled, with long hair and beard, living as a recluse with an elderly aunt, the last of five sisters, the daughters of a prosperous grocer. He had existed under the radar of neighbours and the authorities for decades, with historical events – the war, the atom bomb, the death of George VI – all passing him by. He was removed to Glenside Mental Hospital, as it was then known, and treated for schizophrenia, and was said to be responding well. The story was covered by several regional newspapers, with some variation as to his age and the length of his beard. I was frustrated in my attempts to find out how his treatment had progressed until I found a piece in The Birmingham Gazette of 1953 covering the inquest into his death by drowning in the river Frome, not far from the hospital where he had been a patient: a sad end to his all-too-brief liberation.

I visited Glenside hospital, now a museum, but although I learned plenty about the history of mental illness and its treatment, I couldn’t of course access private medical records, even of that vintage. I could already feel the stirrings of a new novel, but the bones were just too bare. What I really wanted was to invent for the Hidden Man a plausible past and a more hopeful future. I wasn’t ready to revisit the 1950s of Small Pleasures, so I transplanted the story to 1964 – an interesting period of change in both psychiatry and society. This is one of the great joys of writing fiction – you are not, like historians, bound to respect the dates and places of your sources; they are just launchpads for the imagination. 

In the late 1970s my sister had worked as an auxiliary in Warlingham Park Hospital near Croydon, a large residential psychiatric hospital, and I now recalled some of her stories of working life. There were many such institutions in, or usually just outside, towns across the UK. These were often viewed with some fear and misunderstanding and no little prejudice, or with an attitude coloured by films and books like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. 

I was interested in portraying a humane and progressive institution, such as I had read about in my research, one which was moving away from potentially dangerous procedures like insulin therapy and leucotomies, and embracing gentler treatments. Westbury Park, although occupying the site of the former Warlingham Park, is a fictional hybrid of several of these hospitals. 

The problem as always was how to tell the story and I wasn’t sure I wanted the core relationship to be between psychiatrist and patient. Instead, I hit upon a female art therapist as my protagonist, someone working in a relatively new and untested area of therapy, in a subordinate position, who might also be able to illustrate the other ways in which family, society and sexual politics can be a kind of straitjacket. 

Now that I had my two main characters, Helen, the art therapist, and William, the hidden man, I needed a structure. For Helen, as she uncovers the mystery of William’s past the story would move forward through the spring and summer of ‘64; for William, as we peel back the layers of his experience, the story would move back in time. Telling a story backwards and forwards in dual timelines was a narrative technique that I hadn’t tackled before and manipulating the material so that revelations didn’t come too early in the book set me some interesting challenges. By the time I finished the book, the real Harry Tucker had been entirely overtaken by the fictional William Tapping, but I hope authenticity of feeling – truth of a kind – has remained.