Margaret Pelling
Profile
After more than ten years of solitary creative writing, Margaret Pelling will have her first novel published in June this year. Nothing in the story of her early life gives a clue to her aspiration to be a published author – unless you happen to know that as a child in the 1950s, at Brynhafod Primary School on a Cardiff council estate, encouraged by her teacher Mrs Jones, she delighted in writing stories. But on the surface her life seemed to be moving in a different direction: at High School she chose to specialise in science, ‘because I loved the austere beauty of the patterns in nature, and the equations used to describe them’. In 1966 she was the first member of her family to go to university – with a scholarship to study physics at St Hugh’s College, Oxford.
Margaret gained a First in her Finals and then studied for a doctorate in theoretical astro-physics. The thesis that earned her a D.Phil in 1973 was entitled ‘Models for Interstellar Molecule Line Behaviour’. In the same year she married Christopher Pelling (a fellow Oxford graduate from Cardiff) in Balliol College Chapel. Although she won a research fellowship at Cambridge, and later a junior research fellowship at St Hilda’s, Oxford, Margaret decided to quit academic life to take up a post as Higher Scientific Officer with the Department of Health and Social Security. Attracted by the public-service aspect of the job, she worked with administrative civil servants to devise mathematical models to evaluate policy options (for example, costings for new modular courses for training nurses).
In 1978, the same year that her first child, Charlie, was born, Margaret was promoted to Senior Scientific Officer. The high point of her career was giving a presentation to Sir George Young, the bicycling Minister, on medical manpower planning. After a short secondment to the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna, Margaret was promoted to the post of Principal Scientific Officer and moved to the Department of Trade and Industry. Here she managed a team working on financial forecasting models for DTI schemes to support British industry. Her daughter Sally was born in 1983, but Margaret was able to continue working, thanks to the unfailing support of her husband (whose academic career in classics at the University of Oxford was progressing apace). Transferring to the Administrative stream in the Civil Service, Margaret next worked in the Mechanical and Electrical Engineering Division, bringing the concerns of heavy industry to politicians' attention and promoting its interests abroad. This involved much travel, inspecting enormous turbines and boilers for power stations.
By the late 1980s, working in the Shipbuilding Policy Division, Margaret was essentially closing down and selling off the remaining yards belonging to British Shipbuilders. She describes this as ‘a thankless and soul-bruising task, involving putting many men out of work in Sunderland and destroying the ethos of their community’. She comments, ‘I began to have inklings that the Civil Service was not where I actually wanted to be.’ After two years spent working on secondment at APACS, an organisation which regulates the flows of payments that underpin the workings of the City, she was back at the DTI, working on proposals to privatise the Post Office. It was during this time (1991–1995) that she began to write her first novel ‘under the desk’, as they say in the Service. The springs of Margaret’s creativity could no longer be suppressed. One final year, spent at the Projects and Export Promotion Division, helping British business to win orders overseas, culminated in her taking voluntary severance in 1996.
For 18 months she worked in the Oxford University Development Office, but resigned in 1998 for health reasons and since then has concentrated on her writing. Meanwhile, Sally is studying anthropology and politics at Oxford Brookes University, Charlie is studying for a PhD in philos-ophy at the University of Reading, and Chris has been installed as the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford. A collection of Margaret’s poems, entitled That Way, was published in 1999, and a short story entitled The Rothko Room appeared in Mslexia magazine in 2003. She has written five novels to date and has another in the pipeline. Undeterred by rejection slips, she has finally had a novel accepted for publication: Work For Four Hands is due out in June.
The fact that we are all invited to attend the launch of Margaret’s book is a demonstration of her affection for the Chapel Society, to which she has belonged since 1984. It was the death of her new-born son John in 1981 that first jolted her into resuming her long-abandoned quest for spiritual meaning in her life. As a child she had rebelled against what she calls ‘the über-headmaster in the sky’: the Sunday School God who demanded obedience and good behaviour. But her intense awareness of the creative spirit immanent in the natural world never left her, despite her exposure to evangelical Christianity at university, and the objective precision that ruled her scientific career. As a child, she was happiest on a beach. As an adult, she still must get wet in salt water every summer, rain or shine.
Margaret was attracted to our faith by a letter from Revd Frank Clabburn published in The Guardian, declaring that the then Archbishop of York, Dr David Jenkins, regarded by some mainstream Christians as a heretic, would be welcome to join the Unitarians. She wrote to Frank, who put her in touch with Revd Dudley Richards, then the Acting Principal at MCO; he invited her to attend a Sunday service in the chapel. Here she instantly felt at home, among people who took their spiritual lives seriously but had no need of dogma. Margaret says that she lacks the proof of the existence of God for which she was searching in her youth, ‘but I find that my life works better when I am living it in accordance with the idea that there is a "mysterious presence, source of all" – a ground of our being, a matrix in which we are all held. I have no proof of God whatsoever, but I would continue to worship the Eternal Spirit even if the validity of my beliefs were logically disproved. An act of faith is a creative act: it requires more of me because there is no proof.’
This apparently paradoxical statement seems somehow typical of Margaret, the scientist who turned into a poet and novelist. Catherine Robinson May 2005