The Black Pencil Woman

The Black Pencil Woman is Ros Holland’s highly personal memoir of her life and family, centred around her parents and sparked by her mother’s death. Her mother was the black pencil woman of the book’s title, slim and chic in her customary stiletto heels. Her father, whom Ros adored, died when Ros was only ten, and her mother’s overwhelming grief coloured Ros’s early life in unexpected ways, which she examines with calm, almost brutal, honesty. Through an experimental narrative that roams freely, from the First World War and the hardships of a Northumberland mining community in the 1930s, to the post-war rehabilitation wards of a 1950s hospital and the stark reality of a murder in the 1960s, Holland explores the rawness of childhood bereavement, and all the joys and sorrows of family life. The voices of many characters chime in to tell their stories in their own way, in a heart-rendingly accurate portrayal of grief and growth, merged with a powerful social document of the lives of working-class men and women in the north east of England in the early twentieth century.