As part of the blog tour for this incredible story, I am so pleased to welcome a guest blog from author, Olivia Wakeford. In this piece she talks about her childhood and how it inspired The Shadow Pony.
Growing up in the 80s in Wales, I was always aware of the mining history, particularly as my grandad was a miner, just like Evan, the main character in The Shadow Pony. I never really knew my grandad; he died when I was a baby, but the village where my mum’s side of the family lived had a mine just down the road. I remember travelling through the South Wales Valleys to visit my grandma and seeing the air thick and black with coal smoke from the mines that we passed along the way. We’d always make sure to close the windows so the smell didn’t get in, even when it was a scorching summer’s day (and long before air con was the norm). Once the mines were gone, I was always amazed at how clear the sky looked on that same journey.
I joke that as a child in Wales, you probably went to The Big Pit Mining Museum on a school trip as I did. As a former working coal mine, The Big Pit is interactive, immersive, and steeped in history. I vividly remember my trip there, specifically the moment when you are underground and you turn off your miner’s lamp. You’re plunged into a darkness so absolute that you think you’ll never see light again. As a nine-year-old, and an adult going back for research, it’s a terrifying experience… and one that I thought would start a novel with a bang.
On that same trip, I remember seeing the underground stables and feeling a deep sadness for the pit ponies that largely lived their lives underground. Over the years, I’ve often come back to reading about the pitponies, researching a story I didn’t yet know I was going to write. To me, that darkness down the mine is a metaphor for the unknown, not knowing what’s in front of you, which is how Evan feels in The Shadow Pony. He’s had to deal with a lot of changes in the past few years, and all he wants is stability, but through the novel, he has to learn that change is an inevitable part of life and that when you shut yourself off to change, you also shut yourself off to possibility.
I like to set my novels in places that are familiar to me, as it helps with visualising scenes. In earlier drafts of The Shadow Pony, the mine that Evan goes down was The Big Pit. However, as I developed the story, I had to adapt the mine to fit a different narrative. I wrangled for weeks about how I could make it work using The Big Pit, only to eventually remind myself that I was writing a work of fiction and, as the author, I could just make up somewhere that did work! So that’s what I did, creating Aberwaun Mining Museum, my fictional mine, which draws from that mesmerising, terrifying place I visited when I was nine.
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