The White Hare, an intriguing tale of fractured relationships and new beginnings, is set in an eerie Cornish valley and based on a real-life supernatural experience. We talked to author Jane Johnson about her new book.
Jane Johnson’s husband likes to walk the coast path. He takes himself off from their home at Mousehole heading towards Land’s End. He goes alone and, as is his way, will invariably ‘channel thoughts of people’ as he goes, healing thoughts for those known to him who are in need. He will lose himself in those thoughts and in the landscape surrounding him. It’s a meditative act really, says Jane.
It was on one of these walks that Abdel encountered something strange. Going down a steep wooded valley between Treen and Lamorna, he suddenly had an intense awareness of another presence and, looking up, he saw a bright light shooting through the trees. This happened to him two or three times on subsequent walks, in that same location. Nothing hostile, it was as if some sort of power was responding to his meditation. Abdel, ‘one of the most down to earth people you could meet’, says Jane, didn’t mention it for some time, but the story came out one day when they were having dinner with friends.
On hearing of his experience, Jane immediately knew the spot. It was somewhere she felt was ‘an unquiet sort of place, with its own strange, restless atmosphere’.
It was this ‘happening’ that inspired Jane’s latest book, The White Hare, which she wrote during lockdown. Normally splitting her time between Cornwall and Morocco, where she met and married Abdel 17 years ago, she found herself forced to stay in one place. So, she drew on her, and Abdel’s, deep connection to the West Cornwall landscape.
‘Normally I write big sweeping novels set in exotic locations but I couldn’t go anywhere so I was thrown back on to my own experiences.’
The book is set in the 1950s and follows two women, mother and daughter Magdalena and Mila and Mila’s young child Janey, who move from the city to a neglected house in a remote Cornish coastal valley, where they set about restoring the building and exploring the area. As the weeks go by, stories and legends are revealed, including that of a ghostly white hare that some have seen running through the surrounding woodland.
The book has an unsettled, unnerving thread running through it. Alongside this supernatural presence there are disturbed human relationships and trauma, as well as beautiful moments between characters, especially mother and daughter. The book draws on ancient history and echoes of the past, but it also has a post war feel and a touch of 1950s glamour too.
Jane is an established novelist, and also a publisher. She is the UK editor for Game of Thrones’ George R.R. Martin, as well as Robin Hobb and Dean Koontz. For many years she was publisher of the works of J.R.R Tolkien.
‘Books have always been my thing,’ she says, adding that the character Janey, ‘is so much based on me'.
‘I was a very solitary child,’ she says. ‘I just went off and disappeared into the landscape. I would lose myself in comics and taught myself to read. From the age of four onwards I was reading because my parents were so busy setting up a business and trying to make things work.’
Jane grew up in Fowey where her father was a fisherman and took boat trips while her mother ran a small guesthouse, memories of which also influenced Jane’s description of the house in The White Hare.
She writes historical novels and has always been fascinated by connections to the past. ‘Growing up in Cornwall you are always aware of the history. It’s always there around you.’
After leaving the county for her publishing career, she eventually came home and moved to West Cornwall, where many generations of her family have lived.
‘It is remote, far enough away that it hasn’t been developed, so it’s kept its history and hugged its secrets close,’ she says.
It’s those ’secrets’ that manifest in The White Hare.
‘We know this is an area with a very ancient history and that history lies very close to the surface sometimes.’
She’s a skilled mountain climber (it was on a climbing expedition in the Atlas Mountains that Jane met her husband) and this partly explains her fascination with the physical land. West Cornwall is basically a huge slab of granite, but the stone itself is also mysterious, she says.
She recounts the time when she got an electric shock after touching one of the Merry Maidens standing stones. Disbelieving at first, she did some research and found that indeed, under certain atmospheric conditions, granite can conduct electricity.
‘That made me think, what if granite just sort of holds memory in the same way, and it can then give you that ‘shock’ back again, it can transmit the memory back at you, in the right circumstances?’
Going back to that valley which made such an impact on both Jane and Abdel, she says: ‘You do sometimes sense that things have gone on in a place. You feel that there’s been a lot of experiences there and they’ve not dissipated. There is a sense that a lot of history has been accrued in that area. Some of those deep dark valleys, where it’s cool and shady, you definitely feel a presence sometimes.’
For her next book Jane is returning to North Africa and 1950s’ Morocco. She and Abdel are spending hours immersed in North African history. ‘We talk and talk about it - he knows his history - and I then go away and write about it. It feels quite collaborative,’ she says.
They will head back to Morocco when they can, but for Jane, West Cornwall will always be home.
‘That walk from Mousehole to Lamorna, that is the place I always think about when I’m not here. I repeat that walk in my mind.
‘I have to come back to Cornwall. My roots are here and I feel I’m home and I get this feeling only when I come back to this part of Cornwall.’
The White Hare is published by Head of Zeus, hardback £18.99
