Christine Donovan participated in the Heathrow Airport Residency in September 2018. We met up with her in the Red Lion pub in Bitterne, where we talked anarchism, parkour, and walking as a creative practise.

We’re conducting this interview in the Red Lion pub in Bitterne, on the outskirts of Southampton. I understand you have lived in Southampton for most of your life. I wondered, given the place-based nature of The Liminal Residency, what your thoughts were about Southampton as a place?

Southampton is a strange place. Sometimes – just sometimes – I really love it. The new West Quay building with the cinema, for example. When they were building it, it was so close to the existing West Quay building, and the first thing I did when they finished was to go stand in between the two and see exactly how close they were. They’re so close. It’s stunning: the danger in the closeness of those two huge buildings, and all those shoppers just milling around.

There’s a tension in Southampton between it being a cruise ship destination and a city where people live. I don’t know whether that’s ever been resolved, but sometimes you get five cruise ships coming in all at the same time and all leaving at the same time, and so it’s chaos. I think they’ve taken measures to make that less of an issue, but still the road around West Quay is often completely jammed with cruise ship people. Hundreds and hundreds all at once. What a welcome when you’ve just got off a ship!

I don’t have much faith in Southampton City Council. Anything they do always takes a turn. Like the Bargate. I’ve spent a lot of time in Derry, and that’s one of the only places in Europe that still has a complete walled city. You look at the Bargate in Southampton, and it’s not so impressive when you come from Derry! Southampton City Council used to meet in the upstairs chambers. And once they moved out they wanted to knock the Bargate down, because they no longer had a use for it! The Second World War blitzed Southampton, but there’s still that urge to pull down what’s left.

Anarchism is a theme that runs through your creative practise. Could you tell us a bit more about that and how it has shaped your work?

I never thought about anarchism much until I saw something about it on Timewatch. It was three ten-minute segments, and one of the segments was about this anarchist that was blown up right next to Greenwich observatory, because he was carrying a bomb. Nobody knew if it was accidental or not. It was a tiny ten-minute segment which featured some Punch cartoons of anarchists. It was just fascinating.

There were a lot of the anarchists in Britain in Victorian times. The Punch cartoons really showed off the stereotypes about them at the time. Whenever they appeared they were always in a certain dramatic pose. This portrayal fascinated me, and so I wrote my Master of Arts thesis about it, and about Émile Zola, and The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, and a book called A Girl Among the Anarchists by Helen and Olivia Rossetti. I just couldn’t stop!

I started thinking about anarchism and about what it wanted. Is this what I want? With my dad being an Irish Traveller I started to make links between how Irish Travellers live outside of society and embody all of these traditional anarchist tropes, like making a living by being tailors or by working with the Post Office and so on. If you’re an Irish Traveller you always tend to work in the same traditions. I started seeing all these parallels. The more I thought about it the more I liked it.

The Situationist International fascinated me as well. There used to be a bookshop in London called Compendium and it was wonderful. The basement was full of things – reprints of old magazines and pamphlets and so on. It’s very hard to find material about the Situationist International normally, but then you’d go to Compendium and there was all this stuff. It was quite special really. Perhaps I describe myself as a Situationist rather than an anarchist, after all.

How did you come to start writing? And how is it going for you at the moment?

When I was at university Anita Brookner won the Booker Prize with Hotel du Lac – that was when I was in my last year and I thought: that’s what I want to do. But at the time I was 21, and didn’t know how to go about writing a novel. I thought about trying to do the Creative Writing MA course at the University of East Anglia – but I decided against it. It was scary. Creative Writing wasn’t a thing people did, back then, and I wasn’t sure what I would be doing there exactly.

I didn’t write for years and years and years when I had children – not in the 1990s at all, and I got more and more upset because of that, because I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do.

When I did get started the first thing I did was go back to the 1980s, and I wrote an anarchist version of my MA thesis which was very neat and tidy and concerned with proving points, and so on. I wrote a more anarchist version of that. I also wanted then to do another book about the Rossetti sisters, who ran an anarchist newspaper, the offices of which are right next to the British Library. They were teenagers when they were doing this! I found them hugely of interest and I really wanted to write about them.

I was writing that book longhand. But then we had an extension put on our house and there was so much noise and disruption… and I can’t write something and try to always check my sources and get things right when all that’s going on. So that was when I started writing my Victorian novel, which is called Spectacular Times. It’s from the name of a series of situationist booklets, which for English people was a real way into the Situationist International, because there wasn’t much in English at the time. So I called it Spectacular Times, and I’m not giving up that title for anything.

You’ve written a novel that revolves around parkour. Can you tell us more about that?

I went to Derry with my husband, and told me he’d seen these boys jumping around on the walls and he thought I’d really like it. At first I said, “Oh, okay,” and didn’t take much interest. They were doing parkour of course, but I didn’t know what parkour was. My husband, though, kept very gently mentioning it to me, and eventually I realised what it was he was talking about.

That became my second novel, called Jump Derry. All the parkour videos on YouTube are named like that: “Jump London” and “Jump Britain” and so on.

The first time I saw the kids doing parkour there were boys jumping over this line of cannons mounted straight up in the ground. There was something very profound there. When you jump over something like that you’re saying, “This is mine”. People really understood that, when I started talking to them about it.

Eventually I did speak to one of the boys. At first he thought I was his friend’s mum! But I explained who I was, and eventually they found one of them who was willing to show me around and show me the different places where they did things, and tell me what everything was called. He was saying how he liked different areas and different things because of all the railings or edges or places to jump.

What about walking? You mentioned walking during your workshop at Heathrow Airport, and it seems to tie in neatly not just to parkour but to anarchism as well. How does it fit with your creative practise?

On the Residency I talked about different anarchists in Europe who walked very long distances for different reasons. One was Pyotyr Kropotkin who did geographic surveys in Siberia. And there was a group of fifteen anarchists who walked from Italy to distribute anarchist materials. They walked to Switzerland where they were expelled, then to Belgium and then to London. I was really interested in why people walked and what it did to them.

There was another anarchist called Santo Caserio who was expelled from Italy. He walked from Turin to Lyon and was helped all along the way by benevolent anarchist organisations like labour exchanges and soup kitchens. After a couple of months, once he’d reached Lyon, he assassinated the president of France! Whereas that group of fifteen anarchists went on to live in England with the Rossetti sisters, and helped print an anarchist journal, and really just helped people generally.

I wondered why one person who received so much help ended up assassinating the president of France, and other people did other things. Why does walking change you?

I’m fascinated by the Situationist International too. Psychogeography was such an important and political way of being in Paris in the 50s. Guy Debord said that we do not find our manifesto in books, but in walking on the streets. I always want to bring that to any walk I go on – although most of the time it doesn’t come naturally because you’re always doing something when you walk: going shopping or something like that.

If you can find another way through a city – a shortcut – that has psychological and philosophical consequences. If you are walking down an alley and you arrive at a blockade (a lot of alleys in Ireland are blocked off as a way of controlling things and making people change their behaviour), if you can jump over the wall at the end of it you are subverting that and making your own route through a city. People who do that – psychogeographers and the like – have a freedom.

*

Born in the south of England in 1962, Christine Donovan is a settled Irish Traveller, and well knows the liminality of that situation. A long time fan of the Situationist International, she writes psychogeographical novels, and her first novel, Jump Derry, which concerns the Troubles, parkour, emos and Irish dancing, won the International Rubery Book Award in 2011. She also has a long interest in Victorian anarchism in England and Europe. Christine is a housewife with a husband and four grown up children. She blogs at Mostly, I Just Walk Around.