Woman's Hour - Family Secrets. Author Michelle Gallen. Women protesting in India.

Episode Date: February 24, 2020

We continue our series Family Secrets. Listener Melanie explains why she finally went to the police to reveal her family secret after 37 years.There's global attention on President Trump’s trip to India – a guest of Prime Minister Modi of the Hindu Nationalist BJP. This morning he'll be making a speech at a cricket stadium in Gujarrat. Meanwhile- hundreds of women are said to be on hunger strike in Uttar Pradesh in the north of the country, protesting about new Citizenship laws. Salman, Divya Arya, a Women’s Affairs journalist at the BBC in India, gives us the background to the protests which have been going on for some time.Plus Majella works in the local chip shop in a small town in Northern Ireland with her alcohol-dependent mother. She’s the subject of Michelle Gallen’s first novel ‘Big Girl, Small Town’ . She talks to Jane about the inspiration behind it.Presented Jane Garvey Producer Beverley PurcellGuest; Michelle Gallen

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme, peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

This is the Woman's Hour podcast. And we're talking about India on the programme as well this morning. Also today, I know we often talk about books and often I say I've really enjoyed something. This is a book I really hope lots and lots of people read. It's a fantastic novel about a young woman's life in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. It's called Big Girl, Small Town. And the author, Michelle Gallen, is on the programme today. You can also hear from a listener we're calling Melanie.

She's part of our Family Secrets series. And Melanie, I think it's fair to say, has a devastating story. All too common, though. So you'll hear about Melanie's secret and family experience on the programme this morning. So a lot of global attention on President Trump's trip to India. He is a guest of Prime Minister Modi of the Hindu nationalist BJP. He's made a speech, as you just heard in the news, in a cricket stadium in Gujarat.

The arrival of the two men was actually preceded by quite a lot of music, including, fantastically, the village people's Macho Man, which I'm sure a lot of people will have enjoyed. Meanwhile, hundreds of women are said to be on hunger strike in Uttar Pradesh, in the north of the country, protesting about India's new citizenship laws, which offer amnesty to non-Muslim illegal immigrants from three neighbouring countries. Protesters say this is about marginalising Muslims. I've just spoken to the BBC's Salman Ravi. He is in Delhi, where violence has broken out today.

I'm in north-eastern Delhi. This place is called Wazirabad. And the protests have turned violent. Stone pelters and some places, the protesters have set fire on some vehicles and some property. So the situation is really turning bad here. Did you see women involved in these protests? Yeah, women are there where they are staging protests on the road.

But where the violence is taking place, they are mostly men. They are not women. They are fighting with the police, battles between the police personnel and the people who have been protesting and leading a march on the road. So the women who were protesting by sitting on the road, do you know what's happened to them? They are sitting at a different place. There are several protests going on in Delhi, in and around Delhi.

One is in Shaheen Bagh, where the old women, 80-year-old women, they are on strike sitting there. Then in the north-eastern part of Delhi, in Zafrabaz, these are the areas where women are sitting on protests and they're holding protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act which was passed by the Indian Parliament.

Well, that is the voice of Salman Ravi in Delhi. Before speaking to Salman, I talked to Divya Arya, who is the BBC's Women's Affairs Specialist at the Bureau in Delhi. And she told me that women have been protesting in India for some weeks now. Well, the protest, in fact, has only now got international limelight, but has been going on for almost two months. And it started right after the government passed a controversial citizenship law.

And what this law does is, in all its good intent, which is what the government says it wants to do, is to make it easier for refugees who are facing discrimination in neighboring countries of India, get citizenship in India. Now, the reason it is controversial is because it limits these refugees by religion and allows people from all religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, even Christianity, but this allows Muslims from getting this privilege of citizenship in India.

Now, this came at the time India was also starting an exercise to identify its citizens by looking at the papers they have to prove their citizenship. Coupled, these two initiatives led to a lot of fear amongst the Muslim community in India that this is an agenda by the right-wing Hindu government to disenfranchise them and declare them illegal citizens. And effectively, they may even be asked to leave the country. And that's why protests began and they continue even now, only becoming sharper, now leading to a hunger strike. Yes, because there has been a sit-in, hasn't there? And the women have now decided to stop

eating. The women feel that the quiet strike that they've been doing, the peaceful protest that they've been doing, has not got the attention of the government, and therefore they need to do something more drastic, something more dramatic, that would get the government's attention. The government has constantly defended its action, saying that it is a good intent that lies behind both the initiative, the citizenship

law, which gives refuge, and the other exercise, which identifies bona fide citizens of the country, and therefore says that these protests that are not only happening in Uttar Pradesh, in the capital Lucknow, where women have gone on hunger strikes, but in many different cities across the country. In fact, in Delhi, the capital, there has been a similar strike which has been going on now for more than two months, again spearheaded by women with the same demand and with the same exasperation that they have voiced that the government is not willing to talk to them.

And why are women at the centre of this leading it? That in fact is a very interesting aspect. These are Muslim women and mostly from working class backgrounds, women who are homemakers, and if they are working in any gainful employment, it's basically something that they're producing at home. So they are not used to being part of political struggles. These are not academicians, teachers, university professors.

These are women who have not generally come out. They haven't really had a say in the way things are done within their community or even within their families. You know, the men are the dominant speakers there. But this time, they saw that the initial protest against the act was spearheaded by young university students. And that fired fierce backlash from the local police in the different cities. And that's when these women decided to come out. And they are doing this more in the role of mothers. And they say that if we do not protect our children and their rights to live in this country right now, it might just be too late, and they feel responsible for that.

And these women, it's been a really cold winter here in India, especially in Delhi and the northern parts, Lucknow. But these women have been braving that winter, those icy nights, and sitting out, continuing the protest in a 24-7 way for all these months. So can I ask, we know that the women protesting in Uttar Pradesh are now refusing food. Is that happening elsewhere in the country as well? That step has only been taken there, not in other parts of the country, but women have tried to step up their protest. So, for example, in one locality in Delhi, where the sit-in had continued for two months, on Sunday, they decided to move to the metro station of that area, again, changing the location of the protest to make sure that they're seen, they're visible, and their demand therefore gets the attention. Another locality in which the protest has been going on,

the name has trended many times on Twitter and on social media. The locality is a Muslim-dominated locality called Shaheen Bagh. And again, the fact that they're sitting on the road and they're blocking traffic has become a reason in some ways for them to be noticed. But then again, we have to keep in mind these protests across the country have been going on for more than two months. We do no effort from the government to engage with them, no effort from the government at backtracking from a law they believe in. There is some sense of exhaustion, and that is probably what is leading to these more extreme measures in a bid to create more pressure on the government and elicit some response. And of course, all this at a time when President Trump is in the country.

Well, there is a lot of anticipation about whether President Trump will take up this issue or even mention it in his conversations with Prime Minister Modi. We've heard from sources in the Trump administration that the issue of religious freedom will come up, but we don't really know if it finally does or not. On Tuesday, President Trump will come to Delhi. He is in Gujarat, which is the Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi's home state. And today's engagements are more social and cultural in nature. But Tuesday is the day when in the capital they will have talks and hopefully a briefing that will clarify whether President Trump indeed takes this issue up. Well, it will be interesting to see whether or not President Trump does take the issue up.

That was Divya Arya, who is the BBC's Women's Affairs Specialist in India. Our thanks to her. And this is something now, an interview that is explicit and is extremely upsetting at points. So I'm just getting that out there in case you really don't want to hear something

like that this morning. This is another in our Family Secret series here on Woman's Hour. You might well have heard of Operation Hydrant. It was the police operation set up after the Jimmy Savile scandal. And it's said to have uncovered a hidden epidemic of paedophile abuse in this country back in the 1970s and 1980s. Melanie is a listener who contacted us when we asked for family secrets. She's now 51, and she wanted to talk about what happened to her almost 40 years ago.

In this interview, she will speak frankly about being sexually abused as a child by her first stepfather. Jo Morris is our reporter who went to talk to her at her home, and they started by looking at photo albums. There we are. That's my mum and my brother and me. So how old are you in that photo? That must have been in 1980.

Either Christmas 81 or 82. I remember the jumper, but I can't really remember. You remember the proper set of eyes of ice blue woolly jumper. It was beautiful. Very 80s. And it had nice bubbles on and it was mohair. All bubbles. Oh, it was special.

And was this after your stepfather had left? This was after he'd left, definitely, yes. Because that was, yeah, 1981. He'd gone. And do you notice the curtains? This is in a mobile home, we went on holiday. And these gorgeous brown and orange curtains. What were you like as a teenager?

I was vile. I was really, really stroppy. Teenage years were really difficult. And you can see, I mean, I was physically quite well-developed. I had quite a large bust. I think I was probably 12 there. So what happened, Melanie? He sexually abused me, basically.

Now then, photo albums. That is in the house where it all happened. Gosh, it looks different to how I remember it. There might not be any photos of him in here because I probably destroyed them at the time or later these photograph albums came to me later when mum moved and I don't move house so I became the repository of the family album for me roots are important and I think that probably comes from having moved house so much as a child every time my dad had an affair we move house when he wanted to finish it so he was a police officer he would we'd live in

a police house he'd have an affair he'd want to break it off with the woman so he'd ask for a posting somewhere else and then when he died we discovered all these women who'd thought that he was theirs and he wasn't he was ours so that was another secret yes there were so many secrets actually in our family how old were you melanie when your dad died i was 10 when my dad died. And he'd been hard work. I mean, he was aggressive, he was violent. He was very unpredictable. Utterly charming if you met him. And we'd be on the receiving end.

Whoever was closest when he was in a bad mood would just get hit. When you think back to that time, Melanie, what's the overriding feeling? Fear. So you were very vulnerable already when your dad died and then your stepfather moved in? And we were going to be the new, shiny, happy family unit moving forward. And Mum has told me since that he was a very quiet chap

and she thought he was a strong, silent type. Actually, he was just really boring. She'd chosen to marry him and we'd played happy families for a little while. And then I started to feel just a little bit uncomfortable and I couldn't, I really couldn't begin to say why. No idea. There was nothing concrete. I just felt a little bit uncomfortable. How old were you?

I was 12. Uncomfortable how? Just didn't quite know, but something didn't feel, and I couldn't ever have verbalised that because I couldn't, I didn't have the language to be able to say something doesn't feel quite right here the incident that I recall that had the sort of first inkling for me I suppose was that I was walking up the stairs to my bedroom and their

bedroom was at the end of the landing and And as I was walking up the stairs, he was standing in the bedroom doorway, naked, holding his penis. And I can remember putting my hand over my face, turning my head and scuttling into my bedroom and thinking, it must have been an accident. And then I had bad dreams. And I would wake up from a bad dream and he would be there and he might have his hands on my breasts or my genitals and he might have his mouth on my breasts or my genitals and as I woke up he would say oh gosh I'm just looking after you, you're having a bad dream.

And I would think, gosh, yes, I must be having a bad dream. And it took me a very long time to realise, actually, I wasn't having bad dreams. And I didn't say anything to mum because he was an adult and you have to believe what adults tell you. And then there was the day that he took off work and that I took off school and he'd stayed in bed and I was downstairs and I think he called me up to bring him a cup of tea took it upstairs into the bedroom, put the cup down on the bedside table and he lifted the duvet and basically said, come on in. And when I said, what are you doing? He said, don't worry, it's nothing you haven't seen before. And that made me feel more frightened I think and I just ran out of the bedroom along the landing down the stairs

through the sitting room through the kitchen out to the loo locked the door that's the loo downstairs loo only room in the house of the lock and locked myself in and screamed and screamed and screamed because I could not think what I could do to be safe I knew I wasn't safe in the house with him and I needed to be locked away from him he needed to not be near me but I was just screaming I was completely hysterical and he came after me and he was banging on the door saying it's all right I've got my trousers on now and I just screamed and I can remember sobbing and screaming until mum came back and apparently he'd gone over to where she was working told her something of his version of events and she had come back with him and I was still screaming in the loo.

She'd packed his bags, given them to him, sent him away. And then I had eventually calmed down enough to believe that he wasn't in the house anymore and that I was safe and that mum would look after me and that it was okay to come out of the loo. And poor mum, she had no idea what to do really because she had thought that she'd made a nice family unit and suddenly it wasn't. Did she go to the police? No, no. She called our GP who was a family friend

and he came up with his wife and they sort of talked about it in front of me but I was so traumatized by what had happened I sort of wasn't really part of the conversation but they talked about well we could report it to the police and decided that actually that would be too traumatic because I would end up going to court and probably not being believed anyway. 1981, they're probably right. So that was it, really. That was my experience of childhood sexual abuse. All mum ever heard was from him as to exactly what had happened. So I didn't even get to tell her. I couldn't have told her at the time what he'd done. I was just too hysterical.

I was screaming, feeling absolutely terrified and not really understanding quite what had just happened but knowing it was wrong. You had a secret that was never openly named or discussed in the family. It was known within the family, the immediate family, me, my mum and my brother. I don't know if mum ever told my grandmother beyond something terrible because I never talked to my grandmother about it. It was referred to in a very roundabout way as that thing,

that thing he did or what happened, but it was never openly discussed within the family from the day that he left until I went to the police. I suspect that the rest of the family would say, well, it wasn't exactly secret, but none of them could tell you what happened. So it wasn't exactly secret, except we never talked about it. I still held the guilt and the shame and the fear and the anger. So we went to some counselling and mum had one counsellor and I had another. And bearing in mind at 13 you hear things and if you know people are talking about you, you're going to be listening. They were talking and the psychiatrist said to mum, well, let's hope it doesn't put her off sex for life.

My immediate reaction as a rebellious, stroppy teenager was to go out and sleep with anything that walked. Therefore, I was making sure I was showing, I showed him that I wasn't frightened of sex, it hadn't put me off sex for life. But it was also a cry for help. Absolutely, and that was the first of a lot of boyfriends. So you were 13, how old was he?

19 there, yeah. That's quite a big gap, isn't it? It's a huge gap. So how quickly did your mum marry you? I found a photo of him. That's what he looked like. That's him there. There we are.

I haven't destroyed all the photographs. So this is your stepfather? That was my stepfather in 1980 and 81. Well, 79, actually. He was a married man, didn't he? My goodness. When I got to the point of having regular boyfriends instead of just lots of sexual partners, I was very keen to choose quite destructive men.

The last boyfriend I chose before I chose my husband was a particularly unpleasant individual. He was a drug addict. He was probably my very lowest point. There was a point at which he said, Oh, for goodness sake, if you just go and sleep with my mate, then we could have 30 quid and I could buy some more drugs. And at that point, I thought, I think that's not very good. That was the beginning of a turning point, I suppose.

I had had one moment when I was 21, where there was a demo coming through town, women all dressed in black with masks and hoods and carrying banners saying, it wasn't my fault. And I think they were from rape crisis. I don't really know, but I can remember seeing that sign that they were holding and looking at it and thinking, it wasn't my fault. How would you say the secret affected you over the years? I suppose it was a little bit like knowing something's there,

but I didn't feel able to talk about it. And the more we didn't talk about it, the less it felt like it had actually happened. The more I felt I'd... I must have made it much more than it was in my head because because nobody else made a fuss about it so it must have been less awful than I remembered I met Ian we have lovely children lovely stepchildren and grandchildren, and I built a career in education. All of those things, I was outwardly successful. I felt like I'd worked really hard to get them. I'd got myself to a point where actually I quite liked me. And yet there was still this something in the background. So what changed for you? What was the turning point? Hmm. About 18 months ago,

when I finally was in the right place in my head and emotionally. But I was having... I thought I was having memory issues, which eventually turned out to be medication side effects. But I was talking to a psychiatrist who said, this is a safeguarding concern. And working as you do with vulnerable young people, you must recognise that this is a safeguarding concern. And I thought, oh my goodness, yes, it really is a safeguarding concern and I thought oh my goodness yes it really is a safeguarding concern I need to do something about it that gave me the confidence I suppose because although I'd known intellectually that since the Jimmy Savile inquiry

perhaps would be heard knowing that and hearing about all the celebrities that were being accused made me think, well, actually, yes, bad things did happen to me, and perhaps I could, but it wasn't until somebody told me I should, because of safeguarding, that it made me go, oh, yes, actually, you're right, I have a duty here, because it's not just necessarily about me.

So it was 37 years later that you finally let the full secret out. Yeah. Tell me about what happened. Well, I put on my big girl pants and off I went to the police station and I decided that I was going to go in and say I'm here to report childhood sexual abuse I'd rehearsed that in my head as I was walking to the police station so I was geeing myself up but feeling really nervous because I knew that I would actually have to talk about details I would have to describe things and I justurted, and it took a couple of hours to blurt all of the detail and to answer some questions,

not very many, because all I was doing was just telling my story. But I suddenly had a moment of panic. Am I making a fuss about nothing? Is this serious? And when she said, no, that's serious, it felt like I could stop and take a breath. She heard me, she listened, she understood what had happened and took the responsibility for it away from me. I was treated gently. I wasn't bullied, harassed, hassled, harangued. I was treated very gently and very kindly and I was able to take my time and my voice was finally heard. These are my journals, book one, two and three, getting them in

the right order. So you've been writing these journals since you went to the police? I started, actually only started in March, so I went to the police in June 2018 and started counselling in March 2019. A lot of the time when I was writing my journal, I had to sit somewhere and I had to be uncomfortable. I would go and sit in the dining room on a hard chair so that it was more formal and less comfortable so that I physically felt separate from the rest of the house because it was horrible

and I didn't want to be tainting what I have now with what happened then. If I talked to my husband in any detail at all, if I talked to the husband in any detail at all, if I talked to the kids in any detail at all, I think it would have just tainted this. And this is so lovely. I'm so pleased with it all. I didn't want to write it on the computer because I didn't want anybody else to be...

The computer keyboard to be tainted with my story. All the extra bits. My victim personal statement and the bit where I wrote to Mum and said, I can't speak to you for a little while. That was hard. I bet that was hard. It was really hard.

But because I'd woken up all those feelings of anger and I hadn't ch channeled them correctly yet, I was still in that 13-year-old, angry, who's close, who can I lash out at? Yes, mum, you. I just still couldn't quite get past that. And I needed some time not talking to her. Now I felt awful and I felt really guilty and I felt really worried for her. Mum has always acted in what she saw as my best interests at the time. She thought she was doing the right thing by not putting me through a court case as a 13 year old. She thought she was doing the right thing in seeking help which ended up

sending me off to sleep with every man I could but she was trying to be supportive. He wasn't there to be angry at so I showed my anger at my mum and that was hard. When I rang her and said I'm going to speak to the police tomorrow she She said, I absolutely support what you're doing. Of course. He was interviewed under caution initially and he admitted the come and get into bed thing. Eventually CPS said yes, they wanted to bring charges and he, having pleaded guilty, got off reasonably lightly. He has been imprisoned

for three years and he'll be on the sex offenders register indefinitely, which feels about right to me. The local press reported him as a depraved paedophile. How does it feel talking about it now? Completely fine. Honestly? Honestly, because I think I went through such a lot of soul-searching while I was going through the counselling, while I was really experiencing and recording those emotions.

Now he's got no power over me anymore. Those things have been held up. They've been publicly scrutinised. He's admitted that he did wrong and he's been punished. What would you like to come from this interview? I think I would like people like me to feel that they can come forward and talk about their experiences. What does that mean, people like me? Ordinary, everyday people that you pass in the street

when you do your supermarket shopping my abuser was just an ordinary bloke and I was just an ordinary kid we didn't look like a family where there was domestic violence when my dad was alive we didn't look like a family where there was sexual abuse going on when my mum was married to my first stepfather. I usually ask people in this series, how do you feel about the secret now? If you could change anything, what would that be? If I could change anything,

I wouldn't obviously have let anything happen at all. But given that it did, I think I would have liked somebody to have noticed what my teenage behaviour was saying. I would have liked somebody to have realised that, yes, I was difficult, challenging, I was hellish, but actually that was telling them something. And if somebody had picked that up, maybe I would have done a bit better a bit sooner. Yes, food for thought, to put it mildly,

from Melanie and our thanks to her. She calls herself ordinary, but I think you'll agree, having heard her story, that she has extraordinary courage and strength. So our best wishes to her. Details of organisations offering information and support with child sexual abuse are available, of course, at bbc.co.uk forward slash action line, or you can call at any time to hear recorded information. The number is 0800 077 077,

and calls to that number are free. 0800 077 077. Now on Wednesday of this week you can hear Jenny talking to the novelist Anne Enright and on Thursday you'll hear three women talking about their children's cancer. You can hear from June whose daughter Jodie died at the age of 18 last year, from Gerry whose son Luke is now in remission, and from Sam, her daughter Ellie has been in remission for three years. And they're all on Woman's Hour on Thursday of this week. And on Friday, we'll discuss the new stage production of Pretty Woman. How has that plot aged? What do you think about the new stage production of Pretty Woman? I have to say, I wasn't over keen on the

film with Richard Gere and Julia Roberts, but maybe you've got a different opinion. So we'll discuss Pretty Woman on Friday's edition of Woman's Hour. Now to a great new novel about a woman called Magella O'Neill who works in a chip shop in a small town in Northern Ireland

and lives with her alcoholic mum. She is the centre of Michelle Gallen's first novel. It's called Big Girl, Small Town. In 1998, Michelle was just 23 and she'd left Castlederg in County Tyrone and was living and working in London. Then she suddenly started to have really debilitating headaches. I was working in Regent Street and it felt like this kind of incredible dream come true, you know, to be 23 and to be a copywriter and to be working for publishers. I was kind of living the dream in

many ways. The summertime was this amazing thing for me because I remember I had my colleagues, we used to, you know, go for drinks around the corner. We used to sunbathe on the top of our office. We'd take our tops off and we'd sunbathe on top. So life was pretty sweet. It felt amazing and free and difficult. I mean, this was the summer of the Oma bomb and being Irish in London wasn't entirely easy. But that autumn, I got a headache and it just kept getting worse. And I found myself becoming confused. And I'd kind of, you know, had this photographic memory and had this brilliant sort of mind where I could read

things and hold things in my head. And I was always very sure of my brain, I guess. The first really frightening thing for me was I turned up at King's Cross to get the train to York. And, you know, I was always on the money and couldn't find the train to York. It wasn't anywhere. And I asked someone for help and they said, it leaves from Paddington. And I can remember just being so shocked. I know this is a mistake that people might make. This is not the sort of mistake.

It's not your mistake. No. And I came back down to London and I was reading this book and I was halfway through and I suddenly realised I had no idea what had happened in the book. I didn't know the title. I didn't know the title. If I hadn't had a bookmark in it, I wouldn't have known I had started reading it. Can you just describe what it was you actually had?

It wasn't just a really severe series of headaches, was it? No, I had what they now think was autoimmune encephalitis, and that only entered the medical textbooks in 2005. So as a 23-year-old, I was experiencing something that wasn't even in the textbooks. So when I eventually collapsed, they didn't really have a, there wasn't a diagnosis sitting waiting for me. So eventually I went to my office one day and I collapsed and my boss took me to just the hospital around the corner

from the studio here one of the doctors said well what's your name and I said my name is Michelle and he goes your surname I remember going Michelle and he goes to me your full name and I can remember thinking I don't know my name that is a terrifying place for anyone to be but you were so young and of course you weren't at home either no but you ended up young. And of course, you weren't at home either. No. But you ended up back with your mum caring for you, didn't you? Yeah, my whole family, really. I'm one of six kids and my mum stayed at home and she did the level of spoon feeding.

I can remember my littlest sister, she'd come in and kind of try and massage my feet so that I would start to get some feeling in them again they all had their different things that they came in to try and get me back together again in terms of priority I guess was learning how to talk properly again was a good one learning how to walk

learning how to make a cup of tea as an Irish person that was a very important milestone I did write because when I left the office, when I collapsed, I insisted on them giving me my laptop. I'm a work addict. And I took that with me back to Ireland. And I had the laptop and I was trying to write on that because it was easier than holding a pen in terms of motor skills. So I have a series of very difficult-to-understand notes from that time, but my memory was completely shattered. So at what point in your recovery did Magella come to you?

Did the character start to form? I started writing short stories, actually when I was living in Belfast at the point, and I was working for the BBC, and this was the time when I felt things coming back together again and I would have been maybe 27 at this point. So it's three or four years on. Yeah and I was writing a series of short stories and I wrote one a set called Double Tub and it sat in a chipper and it featured a male protagonist interestingly and he had an alcoholic mum, he had a disappeared father, he had an uncle. He had the Daly brothers who are in the book as these very powerful male presence were also there.

Everybody was there. But although I think it was a good story, I had a sense of the presence of this woman in the chipper, Majella. And she was completely silent in the short story. But I couldn't let go of this. And I wanted to tell the story from her point of view. It was at that point where there was cheap rent and no babies. And I took a month off work. I sat down and I wrote 70,000 words in a month. It poured out. It just did. It was like fire. I feel like Magella, Magella O'Neill is now someone I know. Can you just place her for us? Oh, I think the best way to think of

Magella is she's some woman for one woman. I mean, she's a 27 year old woman who's never left the very small town in which she's grown up. And she's been through quite a lot of difficult events in her life. And she's someone who's very sure of herself in one way and utterly unsure of the world in another. I really enjoyed writing the character because I enjoyed the strength of her. I enjoyed her mental strength and her slightly alien mindset, but also her physical. I felt safe inside that character. The book is called Big Girl, Small Town. And your central character is a large young woman. And you're right, she owns her size, doesn't she?

She absolutely understands it's a strength. It's something that in a way gives her a certain amount of invisibility from men. In another sense, she's actually quite physically strong. So there is a scene in the book where her physical strength is very important to her mum's safety. And I think she's very sure of her body, which I love. I love that idea that you'd feel strong and safe inside yourself. She's an assistant in a chippy. The chippy is a very important social hub in this small Northern Irish town. The same people come in every single night, often putting in exactly the same order. And I was going to say all your book does is actually take us through a few days in the life of Magella,

in which she is serving in the chippy. It should be deathly boring, frankly. So why isn't it? Can you explain why this is so incredible? I think Magella herself has had this extraordinary life. I mean, she's grown up in a small town, and it's kind of like any small town, right? You've got the love, and you've got the hate, and you've got got the gossip and you've got the intrigue and this is northern ireland

so you've also got the catholics and the protestants you do so it's kind of strange in that it's a deeply divided world and it's um a world that's full of um stories and stories being told about people and and stories that mean something and stories that can be dangerous. There is a character called Jimmy Ninepines. Yeah. What does Jimmy Ninepines have every single night? He always orders a sausage supper. And a bag of chips, a big bag of chips. There are a wealth of issues explored throughout the course of the novel,

not least the fact that Magella is having, well, quite regularly has sex with her colleague in the chippy after hours. I see Mugello very much as choosing to have sex with the people that she wants to have sex with if they want to have sex with her and indeed she has a menu of men so to speak and she has a few men that she has her eye on. I think that she has an interesting mindset towards what she enjoys and how she'll enjoy it and she's definitely not going to feel ashamed. This is a very modern book. I think there's something very powerful about talking about women having sex.

Michelle's first sexual experiences were with herself. And there is a point in the book where she has to talk about having to figure out how to masturbate because it's not written about in the women's magazines. Nobody talks about it. It is a thing that people joke about and step around. She thinks if it's this controversial, it must be interesting. Margella lives in a town called, I wasn't sure actually how to pronounce it.

Ahibogi. A what? Ahibogi. That is fictional, isn't it? It's absolutely fictional, yeah. But you grew up in Castle Derg in County Tyrone. Yeah. What were the challenges growing up in that part of the world when you did?

I mean, I'm what was called the child of the Troubles. You know, we were born into the Troubles. I turned 18 inside the Troubles. It was the only thing we knew. But our town kind of, it was hit particularly hard. It's a border town. And before the Troubles kicked off, there were 19 roads in and out of the town. And when the Troubles became established, the British Army blew up 18 of the 19 roads.

And you had one road in and out of a town. And it really cut us off from Donegal, which would have been a very natural neighbour. That's in the Republic of Ireland. In the Republic of Ireland, just across the border. And the town was, for a long long time was the most bombed town in Western Europe after the Second World War but then Sarajevo came along and Bono wrote that great song about Sarajevo but he never wrote a Miss Castlederg. So we had a very high death rate in the Troubles and the Protestant community took the brunt of that. If you think of a community living right

on the very edge of Northern Ireland in a no-go area for the British Army, the British Army weren't safe on wheeled vehicles. They were dropped in helicopters and they were helicoptered back out. It was an intense place to grow up. That is the brilliant writer Michelle Gallen. The book is Big Girl, Small Town. And as you might have gathered, I do heartily recommend that you read it.

If you haven't got the time, you can listen to it, which is also a brilliant opportunity, from BBC Sounds. You can hear an unabridged reading by the Derry Girls actress Nicola Coughlan on BBC Sounds of Michelle Gallen's novel. Now, it was pretty painful listening, wasn't it, if we're honest, hearing Melanie describe the abuse that she suffered as a young girl on the programme today. And unfortunately, and I do say that,

it has made a lot of you reassess what you went through or remember, not that I think for a minute you can forget it, the abuse that you yourself went through as a young person. So can I just read some of the emails we've had this morning? And obviously, for good reason, they will all be anonymous. Just listening to that woman talking about her abuse at the hands of her stepfather, I wanted to tell you that in about 1958, when I was about 11 or 12, my parents had befriended a good-looking young man, about 23,

and he often did amateur dramatics with them. I was told to wake him up with a cup of tea and, as I liked him a lot, I took it to him. He then proceeded to abuse me. Later on, I told my mother, who exclaimed, no, that can't be right. But she and my father, to their credit, did banish him from their house and I never saw him again. Children must be taught to tell their parents about things like this so they can be protected. Another listener says this rings so many bells with me. I was abused at around nine or ten. I too didn't initially understand what was happening to me. I remember sweetly saying I've had enough now Well, I went on to work as a nurse. It wasn't until I was 40 that I saw the need to address what had gone on. I had counselling and faced them with what had

happened. They refused to talk to me and I became orphaned. The abuse has affected my relationships. I kind of feel okay now. I too am ordinary, but this has been a secret from many others. Thank you for playing out this interview. And to that listener, I would say you're not ordinary. Well, we're all ordinary, aren't we? Whichever way you want to look at it. I remember quite recently we did a programme, it was an entire programme devoted to the

Child Sex Abuse Inquiry's interim report. And that interim report made very, very clear that most sexual abuse doesn't occur at the hands of so-called celebrities or group leaders or people involved in church groups. Unfortunately, and it is really unpalatable, it occurs in family units. And that is the thing that is so difficult for people to acknowledge and to talk about but please if you can take comfort in the fact that you're not alone um i really do i really do hope that helps another listener says i'm in tears listening to this in the end i will go to the police about

events 40 years ago and i've never seriously let myself think about this before thank you melanie for giving me hope. Somebody else. What an incredibly courageous and positive personal testimony. All respect to Melanie. What clearer message could we have to underline the importance of teaching our children to trust their instincts and intuition and have a say from an early age in who touches them and how? It is so important to teach and respect consent and respect in all areas of how adults touch and listen to children and also to recognize that difficult teenagers are often reacting to difficult circumstances and need to be given a chance to talk to trusted adults often not their

own parents well how true that is and also i, I'm really glad you emphasised that point, that if a teenager is so-called difficult, perhaps all of us should learn to look beyond their behaviour and ask why it's happening. A listener called Carol wants to know about the issue that our brilliant writer Michelle Gallen had. Well, this is because Carol's granddaughter is having severe headaches. Well, Carol, eventually Michelle Gallen was diagnosed with autoimmune encephalitis. So I hope that helps. And our best wishes to you and to your granddaughter. And let's have, let's finish on this one from a listener who doesn't really have to be anonymous, but I don't know their name. So she is anonymous. She just says, Jane, how can you possibly not like Pretty Woman? Utterly classic, feel-good fairy tale.

One of the all-time bits of fun for me and many of my generation. That's late 50s, early 60s. Is this yet another bit of charm that we're not supposed to enjoy anymore because it's not PC? I feel like all the values of my generation are being rubbish by society at present all the skills and good things that we have are no longer valued by society and then she goes on and i'm assuming you're female um there are sudden unexpected unmerited forms of behavior even our beloved radio 4 is changing its programmes to appeal to younger people, leaving nothing for the older ones.

Not Woman's Hour, I admit. Oh. But the News Quiz, Desert Island Discs, they've gone youth-focused and they're making me feel rejected by the world. So there. Well, you've told us, you've certainly told me, and I am very grateful for your input. And I'm not here to read out emails you know about how wonderful the program is exclusively and how all that nonsense I won't do that this is not radio 2 if you have a criticism to make of women's I'll make it there's a really good

chance I promise that we'll acknowledge it and read it out on the podcast thank you to everybody who emailed us today particularly about Melanie's experience We are reading your emails and it's a subject we will explore again, of course. Tomorrow on the programme, our guests include the actor Sharon Horgan. Hi, everyone. Russell Cain here. I've got just a few seconds to tell you about Evil Genius, our hit podcast, two and a half million downloads in 2019, top 10, where we take people from history, Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, John Lennon, and detonate fact bombs around their reputations.

It's stuff you don't want to know, but you really do want to know. At the end of a lively debate, my panel of esteemed guests, read, banging, comedians, all have to vote evil or genius. There's no grey area. This is cancel culture turned into an innovative format.

Subscribe to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds now. like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.