Except for my fantasy novels, I’ve seldom had as much fun writing a character as I did with Sally Reece. Compiling her backstory wasn’t difficult (like most downshifters, she’d had enough of living one way and sought another). However, her role in helping Alan Baker and the part she plays in Romney Marsh community life required certain traits or viewpoints working together, if she wasn’t going to come across as some groan-inducing saint. It’s those viewpoints which make her an irrepressible live-wire people take into their hearts with little resistance. Even Alan does, although at a characteristically slower pace.
Living in a caravan, growing fruit and veg, keeping goats and chickens, and painting one-off, gorgeous watercolours of the local landscape she refuses to sell copies of, Sally colours outside the lines of mainstream life. Then there’s her genuine enthusiasm and acts of charity for those she encounters (especially the forgotten, unloved, or undervalued), in-between driving her backfiring, oil-burning heap of a battered blue Volvo. Only an immaculate appearance, obvious knowledge of the business world, and a certain style gracing her home hint at an altogether different past. Later in the book we learn what that past is, after it catches up with her and Alan.
From the comments she makes and ideas she shares, Sally follows a non-dualistic spiritual path. Her entire reformed life revolves around a woman who casts off the ego at every opportunity where it might assert itself. Her obvious belief in the absolute oneness of all things made it possible for me to portray Sally’s kind deeds as a natural outworking of that ideology. She doesn’t virtue signal, seek praise, or derive any personal gratification from those deeds, because ‘personal’ doesn’t exist for her. She is the people she’s helping as much as she and everyone else comprise The Divine, so who is there to brag or show off to?
When the stakes are raised, it’s that same spiritual path which supplies the strength she and Alan will need going forwards:
“I am you and you are me. Billions of characters in the world, but there’s only one of us, in truth. You can’t be separated from yourself.”
“Are you saying I’m God?”
Sally smiled. “Alan isn’t God; God is Alan. God is all of us and everything. The one and only.”
Through Sally’s Eyes – John Eden
Later, Alan expounds on the transformational effect the watercolour angel has had on him, to his childhood best friend, psychotherapist, Julia Malcolm:
“She’s an original, Julia. A masterpiece, like one of her paintings. The world sees Romney Marsh and its beauty as she does, through her art. Now I enjoy a similar experience concerning my whole being, thanks to her love at work in my heart, mind, and life. The brush strokes of her tender support have calmed my troubled soul. I’ll never be the same.”
Through Sally’s Eyes – John Eden
Sally’s innate cheekiness, her love of winding Alan up with suggestive comments, and a lifestyle rooted in an un-sanctimonious focus on others make her the perfect tonic for our troubled male protagonist, Alan; a man wrestling between what the world says he should do and be, and the pull of his true nature.
‘Through Sally’s Eyes’ will be out in Kindle and Paperback formats from 17th March 18th February, 2024.
John Eden 