Ailsa Piper & Tony Doherty

Ailsa and Tony. Thank you for agreeing to take part in this interview.

The Attachment is a poignant and fascinating journey through the lives of two unlikely friends. I stayed up reading it until the wee hours, and in places I cried. How did this writing friendship come about?

TONY: Well, Ailsa wrote a book called Sinning Across Spain, which told of a 1300 kilometre walk she made across Spain, carrying the sins of colleagues and friends and strangers. A friend of mine gave it to me as a gift – can’t think why! I made my first mistake by opening it – couldn’t put it down. I made my second mistake by writing her a letter of congratulations! She wrote back, I wrote back, and now five years later, we have a mountain of correspondence, a friendship, and a book. Moral – writing letters gets results, though maybe rather more than you had bargained for!

As friends you truly are chalk and cheese (not sure which is chalk and which is cheese). An actress, playwright and novelist, and a Monsignor of the Catholic church.  What were the critical points of connection that cemented a friendship which has been sustained largely through correspondence?

AILSA: Well it’s pretty nice when a correspondence begins with a letter of admiration for your work. But I think the critical things were that we both met someone with a curiosity to match our own. And we both persisted, even in the midst of busy lives, with a conversation that was fun, challenging and sometimes, demanding. Finding out that we both liked licorice and rhubarb helped a lot – but mostly I think it was to do with both of us being real pilgrims. We wanted to roam about in each other’s life experiences, to discover – to talk across a boundary fence or two. That continues.

I love the Victorian use of ‘Dear Reader’. It makes the reader feel like an intimate participant in the correspondence rather than a distant observer. It is a wonderful device. What gave you the idea to employ such a device?

AILSA: I’m a huge letter-writer and a huge reader of letter collections, and I love the idea that something is written FOR the other person. That audience of ONE, as opposed to the big audiences I’ve known as an actor, and Tony has known from the pulpit. So it just seemed like a natural way to address the structuring of the book, and to tell the extra stories we felt that a reader might enjoy or need.

You often sign off your letters in Spanish. I didn’t know that Lo siento (Spanish for ‘sorry’) actually translates as ‘I feel it’.  Did you learn Spanish on the Camino, the subject of your previous book ‘Sinning Across Spain?’ How important is it to learn other languages? What do they give you as person and an author?

AILSA: I don’t normally do this. It’s just that our correspondence began with the book about Spain, and then it became a kind of private joke –as things do with all ongoing friendships. You develop your own language of references and important totems. Like the echidna in the book, and my snail. They are things that come to stand for other things. The Spanish words were a way of linking us early in the correspondence, I guess – we shared so little in the beginning, though Tony knew way more about me because he had read my book.

I love languages and the study of them. They open the world, and they open our own language. Tony studied Latin and it is the ultimate for giving you an insight into lots of things in our strange English world, as well as the Mediterranean romance lingos.

If I had a conventional faith I would probably come and join your Parish. What was it about Ailsa’s book ‘Sinning Across Spain’ that particularly intrigued you and invited you to first write to her?

TONY: Well, she was a seeker. She was “dabbling” in an area that is central to my life, and she had found a personal and quite effective way to investigate the shared responsibility that is central to Catholic teachings. She had “stumbled” (literally and metaphorically!) onto something that I found genuinely compelling and at times moving. Also, I had walked a section of the pilgrim trail, and I understood the potency of walking – its capacity to open the mind and heart.

I have written to other writers when I’ve enjoyed their books, but writing to this woman created an outcome that has been a ‘camino’ all of its own – and I haven’t even had to strap on my walking shoes!

I could go on with questions. This book raises so many.

Thank you both and I am looking forward to hearing you speak at the St Albans Writers’ Festival.

AILSA: I can’t wait to return – this time with my unlikely chum as a conversation partner.

TONY: If she will let me get a word in!