Second time around for Pam

Above: Pam Ayres' new book

Pam, With These Hands was first brought out 10 years ago. We’re very pleased it’s making a second appearance – but what’s behind that?
I’m really pleased, too! The reason is that my last book, Surgically Enhanced, made it into the top 10 best-seller lists. Consequently, the publishers thought they’d bring out smart new editions of my other two books: With These Hands and The Works (which will be out later this year). There is renewed interest in my work; I’ve done a lot on Radio 4 recently, which has spread the word, so I’m delighted these books are being brought back.

Many of the pieces are autobiographical, and stretch from childhood memories to having children of your own…
Yes – in fact, my childhood is fresh in my mind because I recently went back to Stanford-in-the-Vale (about 35 minutes from Cirencester) where I was born. It was to do a piece for The One Show called The house where I grew up, and it really brought home to me how time has passed. My mum and dad have died; and all those neighbours – all those prim families who lived down that little row of houses – have gone. The gardens the men all toiled on have gone; the tonnage of food those gardens produced has gone. Now it’s just grass with a trampoline here and there, but in my memory it was strips of ground intensively worked by those industrious men: extraordinary... But the back door of my home was the same – I touched it and thought how 55 years had elapsed since I was last there.
It was a really modest background, and it must have been drudgery for my mum, though she was a marvellous mother. My husband was staggered that eight of us slept in that one house – my sister and I in mum and dad’s room, and my three brothers crammed into a room that always seemed so big; but now I can see how tiny it was. It was a very sobering experience, and everyone was horrified that we didn’t have flush toilets; that once a week my dad and one of my brothers staggered up the garden with this great heaped bucket, and stuck it in a hole in the garden. But it was the same for everyone.

One of your most popular pieces in With These Hands is Guppy’s Camp, reminiscences of a childhood holiday at a caravan site near Weymouth.
It is a much-requested piece. I tend to think there can’t be many people who remember holidays like that, but I’m not allowed to forget it! We’d never been on holiday before so we didn’t know what to expect, and there was no one to complain to even if we’d wanted to. People were herded into those caravans, and there was this terrible old toilet outside made of four sheets of corrugated iron; they used to come round and empty the buckets in the morning so it must have been home-from-home for my mother! Everyone used to troop to the beach, laden with the necessities for the day, like a column of refugees: cake, sandwiches, towels, cold weather stuff, hot weather stuff, umbrellas… On that first holiday, my dad spilt a whole plate of pilchards on his Harris Tweed jacket. On the bus on the way back, it was so hot that the stench of pilchards rose up and my dad kept asking, “Can you smell them on my jacket?” My mum kept assuring him she couldn’t, but it was pretty unavoidable really. She laughed about it for years afterwards.

Have you favourite pieces of your own in the collection?
One of my favourites is The Biological Clock, about a mother who goes out to work but doesn’t want to be there. I used to feel like that. Before you have a baby, you think ‘I’ll go back to work after such and such a period’ and you believe you can pick up the threads in the same way. But what you do not always realise is the tremendous power of the maternal instinct that makes all those things that used to excite you at work seem second best now. You’ve got this primitive longing to get hold of your baby. I used to get a physical pain in the chest when I was away from my children when they were tiny.

Some of your most poignant poems are about watching your boys growing up…
How Can That Be My Baby is about seeing my son play rugby and not recognising him because he looks so impossibly grown up. The other on that theme is Thirteen-Nil, when my son’s team was absolutely trounced. It was Twelve-nil actually, but I changed it to thirteen so he wouldn’t recognise the situation! The verse that I still feel gutted by is the one where I describe how difficult it was to know just what to say. It’s one of the few times I’ve been absolutely stumped because it was such a complete annihilation! My most popular poems are about the things we all feel, like watching your family growing up. I’m a pretty average sort of woman so, if I feel something, it’s pretty fair to assume that other people feel the same.

You also touch on more serious subjects.
I was pleased with Nowadays We Worship at Saint Tesco: it’s about how the church has completely lost ground and consumerism has taken over. It seemed to me that when they were building Tesco in Cirencester, there were marked similarities with the church. They both had a tower; they both had aisles; Tesco might not have organ music, but it is piped music nonetheless. Some people were offended by the poem, but they got the wrong end of the stick; there was no mockery of the church involved in it.
Littering was another subject I tackled. I wrote that poem because I was down at Preston Toll Bar, near my home, and someone just wound their car window down and tipped out crisp packets, fag ends and silver paper! I didn’t have the courage to go up to them and say anything but I did write a piece about it.
The book isn’t just poems; there are also prose pieces and even sketches.
I don’t feel as though I’ve scratched the surface of what I should have done writing-wise. A demand sprang up for my poems, and I was very glad to fill it, but I do love other kinds of writing. This year, I’m going to pen my autobiography. I’m really looking forward to it – it’s not going to cover from day one to the present day in a chronological way; instead, it will be a memoir of all the most interesting aspects of my childhood. I hope I can strike a chord, particularly with the baby boomers who, like me, experienced that sort of childhood and upbringing. I think Guppy’s Camp is a good example of that: it’s the sort of experience people would rarely think to talk about nowadays, but I’ve written about it in such detail that it brings it all back with a jolt. I so remember that rough-and-ready food and that kind of rough-and-ready holiday. That’s what my mum always used to say: ‘Well, they’ll have to take us as they find us; we’re rough and ready.’

What else is going on in your life at the moment?
I should think I’m the busiest I’ve ever been, and it’s a lovely time to be busy because my family are grown up – they don’t need me in the same way that they used to – and I feel energetic and fit. I’ve been working with Geoffrey Whitehead in BBC Radio 4’s comedy Potting On which, unusually for me, I did not write. I’ve resisted doing anything I did not write myself after a ghastly experience following Opportunity Knocks, when I was given a long television series at London Weekend in the ‘70s. Other scriptwriters were brought in and I ended up having to say things I knew weren’t funny; it was horrible. But this was different; it was written by two young men who have produced sketches for me in the past, and I knew they were good.

You’re also doing a show for Cirencester Hospital League of Friends?
Yes. I’m performing two shows at the Cheltenham Everyman on October 8 and 9, and all the proceeds from the Wednesday show will be going to the League of Friends charity. I’m terrified by the prospect of Cirencester’s A&E not being there, and having to find my way to Cheltenham or Swindon instead. I wouldn’t know where to start! I’m also leading a charity walk around Cirencester Park on Sunday, May 4 in aid of the ‘Friends’. Our hospital is on a lovely scale, and I’m pleased to be able to do something for the comfort of local people who need its services.

You can buy Pam's latest book by going to the Cotswold Life Online Shop on this website.