The Witching Tide: #MeToo novel set in 1645

Margaret Meyer. Photo / Andi Sapey

When budding writer Margaret Meyer moved to Norwich, East Anglia nine years ago, little did she know that the region was home to England’s deadliest witch hunts, nor that she would be so moved by the 100 innocent women who lost their lives there that she would end up writing a book about it. But inspired she was, and next week Meyer’s debut novel The Witching Tide will be published in Aotearoa New Zealand by local imprint Moa Press, before being released in five languages to the rest of the world.

Born in Canada, Meyer was raised in Auckland before embarking on her OE in 1990, aged 30. She arrived in London with a backpack and ￡1,000. Planning only a temporary adventure abroad, she left behind all her worldly possessions and a cat went “on loan” to a friend, but thanks to a work romance that led to marriage and eventually two children, she has been in the UK ever since and happily calls it home.

Meyer’s desire to be a writer started in childhood, but the realities of earning a living and raising a family meant that dream had to take a back seat. Instead, she built an impressive career running parallel to the literary world as a journalist, editor, publisher, and — eventually — as Director of Literature at the British Council. “I’m really not very happy when I go too far away from writing in some shape or form,” she says. Even when she took a midlife career change and retrained as a mental health therapist working in schools, prisons and private practice, she was drawn back to the power of language, using therapeutic writing as a tool for people who have experienced trauma.

After 16 years as a therapist Meyer felt she needed a break, so took some time off to concentrate on writing. She had been doing more since her kids left for university, publishing bits and pieces and entering short story competitions. With the prestigious prose programme at the University of East Anglia just up the road, doing a master’s degree in creative writing was the logical next step. The programme helped her build up a body of work and gave her some much-needed encouragement. “I think I had a voice, I just wasn’t confident of it until I did that course. That was a big shift in the way that I thought of myself, I definitely felt like a writer.”

It was a visit to the Museum of Suffolk that first sparked Meyer’s interest in the local witch hunts which she hadn’t realised were so prolific. The only visible reminders of the region’s bloody past were some streets named after historical figures, certainly none of the UK’s well-known blue plaques that commemorate a location and its famous inhabitants or events. She is hoping that her book might change that. Meyer was horrified to discover that the victims of the witch hunts weren’t generally identified in historical records, despite other accomplices — from the judge to the jury to the man that made the rope the women were hung with — being named. “That really ignited something in me. It’s bad enough to lose your life but to not be named is like you never existed in the first place.”

To Meyer, a great yarn is always important, but it’s how a story comes together in words on the page that is particularly crucial. “I’m interested in what writers can do with just an amazingly crafted sentence, and people who put together really good prose.” She looks up to historical novelists such as Annie Proulx (Brokeback Mountain) and Esi Edugyan (Washington Black), and names New Zealand writers Janet Frame and Margaret Mahy as influences, reading the latter’s stories to her children when they were growing up. While editor at Hodder & Stoughton, she had the privilege to work with Keri Hulme and is so enamoured with The Bone People that she re-reads it every four or five years.

When Meyer started writing about the witch trials she never intended for the work to be a novel. It wasn’t until she workshopped a shortish piece with her peers that it started gaining momentum. ”It became immediately apparent that there was energy around this particular story.” As a result, she made it the main project for her MA. Even then, she had to coax it along from short novella to something more substantial. “If I had sat down at the beginning and thought ‘I’m going to write a 90,000-word epic’ I never would have done it. I didn’t think anyone would want to publish it let alone buy a copy and read it.”

She was wrong. By the time Meyer finished her degree, the book was more than half done and having signed with an agent, she had a deadline looming.

Meyer doesn’t have a rigid writing routine but when she isn’t trotting off to museums or historic houses to research or “capture the ambience of a place” she likes to write at home or at the university library, surrounded by books. She has always been drawn to the English countryside and finds walking her dog Polly helpful to her process. Living near the coast she is often reminded of New Zealand with its “big skies and big seas” and finds the city of Norwich reminiscent of Ponsonby where she flatted while at university, “with that sort of community feeling, the houses all jammed together, you can see over everybody’s back fence and chat to the neighbours”.

The Witching Tide is set in the fictional town of Cleftwater, a composite of the villages of East Anglia where communities were relatively harmonious until the trials tore them apart with fear and suspicion. It tells the story of Martha, a mute midwife who is pulled into the witch hunt against her will, forced to check friends’ and neighbours’ bodies for marks of the devil, while also hiding her own damning secret. It is based on real events from around the region that saw townsfolk turn on each other because their cow got the bloat or their bread went bad. “We look at it now and think it was nonsense but it was lethal nonsense. I wanted to get across that these extraordinary things happened and the really twisted logic that prevailed.”

It’s all harrowing stuff and Meyer confesses spending so much time in that space wasn’t easy. “At times it was a horrible book to write, but whenever I felt overwhelmed by it, which was often, I kept thinking about those women. It seemed very important to commemorate them, so that kept me going.” Her book is dedicated to them.

The novel’s UK publisher describes The Witching Tide as a “#MeToo novel set in 1645″ because it covers themes that are still relevant today. Meyer sadly reflects on the Taliban forbidding girls to go to school in Afghanistan and the high-profile case of Sarah Everard, who was murdered while walking home in London. “Women are still being killed just for trying to carry on with their lives.”

As part of her two-book deal, she is already working on her second novel, a sequel of sorts, set in the same village. All going well, when she revisits those locations, she might spot some new blue plaques hinting at the women long gone, but thanks to Meyer, not forgotten.

The Witching Tide, by Margaret Meyer (Moa Press, $37.99)