Tessa Hadley: ‘I write about the middle class. I know everyone is embarrassed, but I love it’

It’s not unusual for members of the literary establishment to congratulate each other, especially if they share a publisher or agent. Yet Hadley is not the groovy new kid on the block in need of quotable permission (although she appreciates their words enormously); she’s a 60-year-old British novelist who brought out her first novel at 46 (she’s published six, plus three collections of stories) and writes “parochial” tales (her word) about middle age, the middle classes, broken marriages and dementia. Her characters are often well-heeled, usually white British and living in the decades of Hadley’s lifespan. Her books — highly literary Aga-sagas, but without the Agas — are not optioned by film companies or TV drama departments and have never been adapted by Stoppard. They are blissfully low-octane but utterly authentic. She has only just started scooping prizes and, even so, the Booker and the Costa have so far left her untroubled.

However, her most recent novel, The Past, published in 2015 to critical applause, won Hadley the lesser-known Windham-Campbell prize last March, worth a huge £107,000. The story, about a set of siblings who descend upon their late parents’ house in Somerset for one last holiday together, enraptured the judges who said she “brilliantly illuminates ordinary lives with extraordinary prose that is superbly controlled, psychologically acute and subtly powerful”.

So who is this mysterious goddess who can cause such rapture with her realism and plain-speaking prose? We meet in her light-filled apartment in a grand Victorian house that she and her husband, Eric Hadley, a schoolteacher and playwright, bought four years ago, partly with the proceeds of the sale of their family home in Cardiff (they have three sons together and Tessa is stepmother to Eric’s three sons from a previous relationship; the youngest is 25, the eldest 50).

The flat, a serene post-kids haven with woven rugs, books and excellent coffee, is in Kilburn, northwest London. Hadley, tall and slim with long brown hair streaked with grey, is very good company. She is also professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University, where she has taught for 20 years (“I am eligible for the £100 voucher,” she jokes). She talks fluently and amusingly about her main job without sounding as though she is giving a tutorial.

So what took her so long? She points to a combination of the needs of her family, lack of confidence and connections but, mostly, that it took ages to get her subject right.

Hadley was born in Bristol to Geoff, a teacher and jazz trumpeter, and Mary, an amateur artist. After school she studied English at Clare College, Cambridge, then completed a PGCE and became a comprehensive school teacher in St Neots, a “grim, little, strange” market town in Cambridgeshire. She hated it (“I am too selfish”) and lasted two terms (by now she had met Eric and became pregnant to escape the classroom).

They moved to Cardiff with Eric’s work and for years she would write whenever she could, but her life was pretty domestic. “I was at home trying to write and failing and being nobody and having lovely friends and family but having this weird sense that I was clever, I suppose, but I didn’t quite know what to do with it,” she says. “I had no role in the world, no career. It seems weird to my daughters-in-law that I could have lasted that long.”

It wasn’t until she began a creative writing MA at Bath Spa in her late thirties that she realised she was getting good. “When I was failing I was trying to write about the miners’ strike or political prisoners in French New Caledonia,” she says with a throaty laugh. “You know what? I was no good at that. Then I thought, ‘I am going to write about that class I know. And I know everyone is a bit embarrassed of it, but I love it.’ The British middle class is a comic subject and a tiny subject and there is something worth telling about it. So that was it.”

She toiled away at various novels but chucked them; it wasn’t until she started writing short stories that she nailed her style. “I wrote one or two and thought, ‘Ah! That’s what I sound like! And I got it. It took a long time for me.” In fact her first published novel, Accidents in the Home, she says was really a series of short stories about the same people told in chronological order. “I thought: ‘I don’t know how to hold a novel in my hands. It’s spilling over and is too slack. Why don’t I make a novel as springy and tense as a short story can be?’ ”

The short story is often treated as the down-and-out cousin of the novel — just last week Rose Tremain castigated publishers for not taking the form more seriously — but Hadley calls short stories “my first love”. “It is a brilliant rhythm as a break from a novel,” she says, sipping black coffee on her sofa. “It gives you a lovely kind of liberty.

“A novel is a great big building and you are making everything work in relation to everything else. There is a particularly long patch when you have lost the freedom of beginning but you haven’t come to the downward roll of ending. In a story it doesn’t even matter that much when it goes wrong,” she says. “With a novel you are wasting two years of your life.”

The stories in the new collection — all previously broadcast or published individually (two in The New Yorker, which first published her years ago) — have classic Hadley themes: fractious families, isolated children and women who are shrunken by their domestic situations.

In An Abduction a 15-year-old girl in 1960s’ Surrey is taken from the end of her drive and returned without her parents noticing. In The Stain the carer of a grand old man discovers her charge has a dark political past in South Africa. Will she accept his life-changing bequest? Experience involves a woman whose marriage has fallen apart. She house-sits for another woman, receives a visitation and finds secrets in the attic. In the title story, my favourite, a young girl dreams of a dark epilogue to her favourite book, Swallows and Amazons, and is inspired to upend her parents’ lounge furniture.

“I did once turn the furniture over,” says Hadley, who says some but not all of that story is autobiographical. “My mum and dad were having a dinner party and I got up and I had this feeling of wanting to break something that was too perfect and sealed and my mum thought for years that it was a guest who had got drunk. She said: ‘It was you! I always thought it was Alan Tuckett!’

“I had a happy childhood but I was painfully shy and acutely watching and taking in. It is vivid what you feel like as a child; you just have to find the door to open it.”

Hadley does some research, writing in notebooks “descriptions of the weather”, and recently looked up “kitchens from 1972” for a her latest story, but “mostly it is memory” that fuels her writing. “Not precise memory but memory as a hunch and a feeling and an atmosphere. When I started I thought I wasn’t a person with a good memory but you tap into uncanny places where you have things saved up that you didn’t know you did until you got to that level. You don’t know until you have to that the sandwiches were wrapped in greaseproof paper, not clingfilm.”

The “deepest truth about realist fiction” is in the minutiae, she says. “The whole texture of the work is the details of that world and no other. What was it like being a teacher living in a skinny, dilapidated Georgian house in 1967? What colour did they paint the walls? What words would they have used when they were speaking to each other? What were their political opinions about American imperialism?” She suggests that if you get it right you can transcend narrow parochialism. Although later she adds that “for the novel parochialism is not a bad word, it is the ground of the fiction and the great British fiction tradition”. She cites Alice Munro’s authentic details of carpentry stores in 1950s Canada and Joyce, abroad, writing to friends to ask them the precise order of the shops on O’Connell Street in Dublin.

She says the closest description of her philosophy of writing is articulated by the character Stella in her novel Clever Girl who celebrates the incredible twists and turns that a life can take. “Stella says: ‘The substantial outward things that happened to people were more mysterious really than all the invisible turmoil of the inner life . . .’ ”

She takes another sip of coffee. “It’s amazing when you go to a funeral and hear the story that now has its full stop. It’s astonishing the events that are half made and half accident.”

Does this truth-telling upset those close to her? Do friends and family see themselves and balk? She nods. “You have to be so ruthless when you are doing it, but there are a lot of subjects I would love to write about and don’t. My mum is going to be a wonderful subject. I just don’t have to write that story yet.” Mostly she feels wary of writing what she doesn’t know. “I think you have to live it,” she says. “To be a true witness you can’t get your stuff second-hand.”

When I have gone she will crack on with a story, set in 1972 (with an authentic kitchen), about a girl who does catering for dinner parties — she did a similar job at that age. It’s a commission for BBC Radio, to coincide with the publication of Bad Dreams, but also a way of shedding light on her new novel about “what happens when two couples are friends and one of them dies”. She’s 18 months into the novel and hopes to finish it by summer.

Hadley looks happy and satisfied. She clearly enjoys the writing process and says that she feels lucky she had a slow start because she remembers how things were. “It is lovely being a writer and getting nice reviews and prizes, but it could go to your head,” she says. “It could distort your perception of what life is like.” She may have to plunder her reserves of ordinary, for I suspect the jacket quotes are unlikely to dry up.
Bad Dreams and Other Stories is published on January 26 by Jonathan Cape, £16.99