Adrian Mitchell on blending fact and fiction

Adrian Mitchell is one of our most popular and prolific authors at Wakefield. From Plein Airs and Graces, the biography of George Collingridge that got Adrian shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Awards, to Dampier's Monkey, on the south seas voyages of William Dampier, Adrian's skills at biography are well documented. But in his last couple of books he's moved a little left of centre, using historical figures as the basis of fictionalised work. It started with The Profilist, a novel about Ethan Dibble, who bore more than a passing resemblance to S.T. Gill. His latest is The Beachcomber's Wife, based on the life of E.J. Banfield.
Adrian explains his inspiration in this lovely little author's note:
 

For twenty-five years E.J. Banfield rambled about Dunk Island, exploring its reefs and forests, drifting about its bays, and defending the liberties of its nutmeg pigeons and all other small birds. He sent off to the newspapers a steady stream of genial and sometimes whimsical articles about the natural history of the island, and the largely idyllic way of life there; and The Confessions of a Beachcomber (1908) inspired at least one enthusiastic reviewer to wish that he too could ‘go a-Dunking’.

Astonishingly, what Banfield largely leaves out of account is the presence of his wife for all those years. Which strikes me as strange. Even Defoe’s castaway acknowledges his Man Friday. And keeps him in his place. What kind of beachcombing is it which involves a household?

There can be all sorts of explanation for Banfield’s silence, of course, but what I have imagined here is how it might have been for her, over those years, and more particularly in the three days as she waited for help to come after her husband’s death. To that extent, yes, there is fabrication here. That is what writers do. But there is not falsification. I have been guided by my reading of the source material.

Because I have helped myself comprehensively to details from Banfield’s publications, rearranging them to suit myself, and likewise from Michael Noonan’s helpful biography A Different Drummer: The  story of E.J. Banfield, Beachcomber of Dunk Island (1983), I have signalled my free-handed pilfering by calling my character Edward, not Edmund, and changing most of the other names too. Even the dogs are renamed, to protect the innocent. I followed my sources by not calling his wife anything because neither did Banfield, or not in the published material.

In giving her a voice, I am of course implying a critique of Ted Banfield, a critique such as a wife of nearly forty years might allow herself, especially one with a glint in her mind’s eye, and who filled her days by rummaging in her husband’s library.

It has of course occurred to me that writers are by their nature a kind of beachcomber too. I should not want my own wife to read too much into that.

To read Adrian's imagining of the life of the Banfields on Dunk Island, click here.