After the rapturous welcome which local audiences, taking pride in the roots of their ancestry, have justly given to 'Clog Dance' are they ready to open their minds to reading 'Immigrants'? Frederick Lightfoot, Beckermet novelist with an international perspective, focuses intensely on the experience of the Irish immigrant community that came to West Cumbria to mine coal and face accusations of being "paid to come over here, paid to cut their wages take their jobs." The experience of being an exile haunts his imagination.
The book will be more challenging than John Marcangelo's musical, and not only because it will require reading. Lightfoot insists on making his readers imagine the terrible pain endured by ancestors who struggled to establish a perilous foothold in West Cumbria a hundred years ago. He describes murderous street battles where men are stoned or hacked to death . He describes the first descent into the mine of Robert, a young visionary who loved light but would have to face up to a prospect of darkness among pit ponies who had become blind, where chewing tobacco was necessary as a way of trapping and expelling coal dust that would settle on the lungs. He describes fatal casualties in childbirth when poor families could not dream of the support of a skilled midwife, let alone a doctor. He gives graphic accounts of slaughter in two world wars, and of the agony of a survivor's return, emotionally crippled by his terrible memories.
"There can't be any pain where there was no love," Bill tells Mary grieving following a family accident. "Between grief and nothing choose grief." Yet Bill later despairs of a world that does not like its strangers. "We are all exiles at the end of the day. Of course we are all Jews, all part of the same stubborn, dogged tribe." Like devoutly Catholic Kate, Bill recognises a kinship with Jews, united by a sense of being dispossessed, yet always, like the dark-skinned Spanish Jew, whom the children call Mr Fancy, "mining for fabulous objects."
In 'Immigrants', Lightfoot stares into the real face of fascism, asserted in these words of the demagogue Murphy: "Race implies difference and difference implies superiority and superiority leads to predominance," and recognised by John Devlin, who carries the guilt of unconfessed and unexpiated murder with him all his life, as "meaning we despise the person who isn't us." What did it take to endure this? Yet endure they do and so open up possibilities for their descendants which at the time they could not dream of. "He knew there was a dancer waiting for him. It wasn't the time to think of another country."
Expect a challenging read. In all his writing Lightfoot adopts a two eyed stance, making his readers experience suffering as if it were their own yet recognise the degree to which it is self inflicted and sometimes necessary. Action develops out of character moulded by circumstances beyond anyone’s control, since nature cannot choose its origin, and this raises his novel above the level of a sentimental chronicle of disasters and gives it a tragic dimension. His stark narrative is resonant with unstated implications. His characters sometimes fight heroic battles for a world that no longer exists and he shows what it is like for parents to be baffled by their own children as they take on a new world.
There are copies waiting for you at Esoteric Dreams Bookshop in St Bridgets Lane and at Lowes Court Gallery, and Lightfoot will be delighted to attend book clubs who would like to discuss the book with him.