I was sitting on Kate Saffin’s boat looking at a stir-fry recipe.
A magazine was open on the sofa between us and, despite the fact that I had gone there to talk to her about storytelling, history and theatre, we had temporarily become distracted by dinner.
“It seems like you spend quite a lot of time thinking about food,” I said.
“Well, it’s better than sex,” Kate replied, without hesitation.
Then she considered this for a moment.
“And, living on a boat, I don’t have a garden.”
Fair enough.
Trying to describe Kate is slightly difficult because she appears to have accumulated several lives at once.
She is a boater, former nurse and health visitor, historian, researcher, writer and performer. She knows an extraordinary amount about waterways history and is one of those people who, if she doesn’t know the answer to something, probably knows somebody who does.
She is also something of an authority on compost toilets and runs an enormously popular Facebook group devoted to the subject. There is, as far as I can tell, almost nothing about poo that Kate doesn’t know.
But when I asked her how she would describe herself, her answer was much simpler.
“I’m a storyteller, primarily.”
And the more we talked, the more that seemed exactly right.
Kate is particularly interested in the people who are difficult to find.
Not the famous ones. Not necessarily the people whose names appear neatly in documents and official records.
Quite often she is looking for the ones standing just outside the picture.
Women feature strongly.
One of the clearest examples is her work on the 1923 boatmen’s strike at Braunston.
The men involved in the dispute left a trail behind them. They were striking, negotiating and appearing in official accounts, so their presence was recorded.
The children occasionally appear too, not least because some of them went to school.
But the women are much harder to see.
And yet, while all this industrial unrest was going on, somebody was still feeding the family.
Somebody was looking after the children, stretching whatever money was available and keeping everyday life going while their home and livelihood were tied to the company their husbands were fighting.
Kate became fascinated by that absence.
What were those women saying to one another?
What were they frightened of?
What happened inside the cabin when the meetings and negotiations were over?
There often isn’t enough surviving evidence to answer those questions through one identifiable person.
That is where Kate’s particular form of storytelling comes in.
Canal history frequently survives in pieces: memories handed down through families, snippets from oral histories, incidents people remember clearly but cannot always place precisely in time.
Kate gathers those fragments and builds characters capable of carrying them.
The character may be fictional, but the experiences woven through her story are not.
It allows Kate to move beyond explaining what happened and instead ask what it might actually have felt like.
Accuracy matters enormously to her. Sometimes, perhaps, a little too much.
Kate admits she can become almost paralysed by the desire to get everything historically right — disappearing into more and more research because there is always the possibility that one final piece of information is still out there somewhere.
And occasionally she becomes so caught up in getting the history right that Joanna, her co-director and dramaturg, has to remind her of something fairly fundamental:
They are creating drama, not doing a TED Talk.
In hindsight, it makes sense that Kate ended up working this way, although her route to it was hardly direct.
At four years old she announced that she was going to become a nurse, and duly did.
She later became a health visitor, a job that involved spending a great deal of time listening to people and learning about the lives behind whatever problem had brought her through their door.
History had fascinated her since school, particularly after a teacher encouraged her to look past kings, dates and battles and think about ordinary people caught up in events.
Then, while studying later in life, she discovered archives.
“I just loved the stories,” she said.
Theatre entered the mixture almost separately.
Kate became involved with amateur dramatics in Oxford and eventually came across Ramlin Rose: The Boatwoman’s Story by Sheila Stewart.
Even the name carries a story.
Rose’s real surname is Rampling, although she has only ever heard it spoken as “Ramlin”. She discovers the truth when she takes her marriage certificate to get her ration book and finds herself addressed as “Mrs Josiah Rampling”.
Her response is wonderfully Rose:
“Well I never! Jo Syer. I kept the Jo, it was rather nice to ’ave the two, but I weren’t fussed about the Rampling, I’ve kep me Ramlin ever since.”
Kate began reading parts of Sheila Stewart’s story aloud to her children and realised that some of the voices seemed to change when spoken.
They wanted an audience.
So she adapted Ramlin Rose for performance.
Then her daughter Harriet, who was studying theatre in Edinburgh, suggested that she take the show to the Edinburgh Fringe.
Kate initially regarded this as a fairly improbable idea.
But after visiting the Fringe, watching solo performers and discovering that they were, after all, ordinary human beings standing on stages telling stories, she found herself thinking:
“I could do that.”
So, in 2005, she did.
Ramlin Rose went to Edinburgh and received a four-star review from The Scotsman. More importantly, Kate discovered that performing the same story repeatedly didn’t make it lifeless. She continued finding things inside it.
Other productions followed, drawing on canal history, wartime boating families, oral histories and women whose experiences had otherwise left only faint traces.
But the catalogue of plays isn’t really the thing I came away thinking about.
It was Kate’s habit of looking sideways at history.
Official records naturally favour certain people. The people who owned things, signed things, ran things, complained loudly enough or found themselves on the wrong side of the law tend to leave paperwork behind.
Meanwhile, somebody else may have spent an entire lifetime working, caring, worrying, feeding children, keeping boats moving and holding families together without leaving much more than a name.
Kate is interested in that somebody.
She looks at what survives and asks what might be missing.
Then she starts looking for the fragments.
And somehow, from those fragments, a person begins to speak again.
