The year before that, Samson’s friend, the journalist Cassandra Jardine, died of lung cancer. And the year before that, Samson’s eldest son Charlie went to prison after admitting “violent disorder” for his part in an attack on Topshop that followed the tuition fee protests of December 2010, during which he was pictured on the bonnet of Prince Charles’s car and hanging from a flag on the Cenotaph.
At times she found it difficult to focus on anything else. The first draft of the story that grew into The Kindness was framed by an account of a prison visit. Then there was a plan for an intriguing combination of novella and linked short stories. But over the course of the miles-long walks she takes from her house on a bustling corner of the sea front at Hove, Samson gathered her material together and stitched it into the densely plotted, dynamic domestic thriller – with an English idyll of ivy-covered house, meadow and hammock on the cover – that is sitting on the coffee table in front of us.
“It’s the most gleeful sort of writing there is,” she says from the large sofa where she is smoking roll-ups and looking out to sea. “For days I’d be thinking, how does this happen? How do the characters not know this information or how do we not know it? All those technical problems. That’s the thing about walking – or sleeping, it’s the same – it just solves them and then you can’t wait to get back to the top of the house.”
By coincidence, following the triumph of Helen Macdonald’s memoir H Is for Hawk, The Kindness opens with a falconry scene, but swiftly moves indoors to trace the contours of grief. Julian has lost both partner Julia and daughter Mira, and is stuck in a country house with their ghosts, his overbearing mum and needy former girlfriend.
From empty picture frames and beds the novel moves backwards, to the couple’s ever-so-romantic beginnings, their grotty L-shaped flat, and the accidental pregnancy and miscarriage that preceded Mira. On a whim, we learn, Julian moved the family back to his picturesque childhood home, Firdaws. Then childhood cancer struck: blood tests, scans, tubes, “pale, curdy sick”.
The novel is contemporary but deeply indebted to the past. Samson’s grandmother used to say the family lost “just two aunts” in the Holocaust, but since her father’s death, and aided by a trunk of papers she inherited, Samson has become obsessed with piecing together the truth. In particular she is interested in her great-uncle Heino, who killed himself in the 1970s and whose black-and-white photograph of painter Mark Rothko sits behind her on a shelf. The feelings of living people mean she must be careful what she reveals, but she has drawn on family secrets in The Kindness and recently went to Paris to meet the woman Heino loved in later life.
“My father was from Hamburg and most of his family got out, but like a lot of people he didn’t want to talk about Germany, the war or the Holocaust,” she says. “It was sealed off, and when we went to live in Cornwall” – in 1970 when she was eight – “ties were pretty much severed with everyone except my grandmother. I had no access to my Jewish family at all but they did all the things I do – they wrote, they took pictures – and finding out about them has given me a much stronger sense of who I am.”
Samson’s husband is David Gilmour, the musician, best known for being in Pink Floyd, with whom she has two sons and a daughter. Gilmour, who is 16 years her senior, has four adult children from his first marriage and Samson’s son Charlie also comes from a previous relationship, though Gilmour adopted him. They are a modern blended family, but what is striking about Samson’s background is that this is nothing new. Second and third marriages and webs of siblings go back at least two generations to her grandmother, an East End chambermaid of Jewish or Romany origins who married the scion of a well-to-do Shanghai family but was sent back to England following the 1937 Japanese invasion, leaving her husband to start again.
Samson’s mother Esther was six at the time, and she and her brothers went first to a children’s home and then to what Samson calls “pretty scary foster parents”. She survived to fall in with a group of Spanish communist students, marry a Chinese-American war hero and smuggle herself to China. There, she found a set of half-siblings, though not her father, and stayed for 10 years, serving in the Red Army and working as an interpreter for journalists including the Daily Worker’s Alan Winnington, who became her second husband.
Samson’s parents met in East Berlin, when the British Communist party gave her father the job of trying to get Winnington out of China, where he was stuck without a passport. They fell in love and had Polly before marrying in 1969, but Winnington remained a long-distance member of the family, with his son and Esther’s child by her previous relationship brought up with Polly, who grew up calling her biological father “Lance” and Winnington “Daddy”.
Samson’s parents stuck with the Communist party through the Soviet invasion of Czechslovakia and gave up their membership quietly in the 1970s. Her father went from the Daily Worker (now the Morning Star) to the Packet group of local newspapers in Cornwall, where her half-Chinese mother became head of a village school.
“My parents very much enjoyed each other’s company and didn’t really need anyone else,” she says. “We lived in an old tin-mining village that even people in the next town had never heard of. They didn’t have a lot of friends or do much socialising. Maybe they just wanted a rest.”
Samson had virtually dropped out of school by 14, but at her grandmother’s urging she moved to London and got a secretarial job in publishing, from where she rose to become head publicist at Jonathan Cape. She began a relationship with Williams, moved back to Cornwall and in 1989 had their son. When Williams walked out, Samson returned to London in a “terrible state” and was offered a place to stay by Jardine, a virtual stranger who became a close friend.
A “really, really secret writer” for many years, Samson wrote her first novel in six weeks because she wanted it finished before her short stories came out and bad reviews crushed her confidence. In the event critics were enthusiastic: her new novel has received much advance praise and she has moved to a new publisher after a prolonged courtship. At Gilmour’s urging she also revealed herself as his lyricist, and lights up with excitement when she plays me rough versions of a couple of tracks on his forthcoming album. One was inspired by book two of Paradise Lost; another by a painting on the wall above the fireplace.
Samson suffered a pang about her own lack of education when she delivered her son Charlie to Cambridge. She struggled in her 20s, she says, when “everyone else had a gang from university”. Reading Paradise Lost, which features in her novel as well as Gilmour’s song, she thought: “I would love to be going to lectures. I would love someone to set me an essay on this.” When stuck with her writing she took to spending long days at the piano, having begun lessons to help her children before deciding to take the exams herself.
Her last book of short stories had the ironic title Perfect Lives. Since then Samson has had what she calls “about the most horrible experience of my life”, visiting her son in prison: “They make it about as unpleasant as they can. The glass is smeared with semen and you speak through a kind of box. I had one or two of my younger children with me and it was terrible for them.” She remains angry about what happened, and critical of legislation that meant Charlie was convicted of “violent disorder” although he didn’t attack anyone.
But as she sets out for her afternoon walk with songs to write rather than a plot twist to resolve – she is where she wants to be: “I feel like I’ve hit my lyrical stride,” she says. “I am so in the mood for this.”
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