Jill Dawson’s readers are very rarely anything but effusive. While not as well known in Australia as she is in the UK, Dawson’s ability to create engrossing narrative voice and to evoke place has won her deserving praise.
The author of seven novels, it wasn’t until the release of her third, Fred & Edie (2000), that Dawson received the critical and public attention that propelled her career and secured its longevity. Fred & Edie, Dawson’s representation of Edith Thompson – hanged in 1923 – was finalist for both the Orange Prize and Whitbread Book Award, and is an exquisitely written account of a woman condemned by the society she lives in. Next came Wild Boy (2003), about the ‘Wild Boy of Aveyron’, and then the Orange Prize long- listed Watch Me Disappear (2006).
Kill Your Darlings spoke with Jill Dawson about her need to continually challenge herself, the delicacy and thoroughness required when writing about the dead, and the transformative power of literary awards.
– Hannah Kent
KYD: Hello Jill. I thought we’d start by talking about your novels quite generally. I was reading an article by John Self in the Guardian last year, and he said that while some writers have a similar narrative tone from book to book, you seem to reinvent yourself each time you write a novel, while also remaining recognisable. Is this reinvention accidental or unintended?
JD: I love that quote too, by John Self. He’s put his finger on something that’s been a real feature of my work. It has possibly worked a bit against me. I mean, if you think of Sarah Waters, even though she’s written about different topics, there’s something similar in each novel: the themes, the handling of the gothic, the lesbianism. I think it’s hard for people to get a handle on what it is I’m doing, and I myself think it is unconscious.
The ‘reinvention’ may be because I keep setting myself challenges. In fact, that’s what I’m doing at the moment for the new novel. I have male characters and what I’m finding hardest are the two male voices. I’m the mother of two sons and my husband has two brothers, so I have brothers- in-law – a lot of nice men in my life. I think I’m tuning into something about masculine voices and concerns, and boyhood. But on the other hand, it is a challenge, and I keep thinking, ‘Oh! Why don’t I just do something I’ve done before!’ [Laughs.] So I wonder if it isn’t that? A stubbornness…
I get very obsessed when I’m working. When I was working on Wild Boy [based on the c.1800s historical case of Victor of Aveyron, a ‘feral child’ who lived his childhood alone in the woods], I read everything. I couldn’t know more about France, the French Revolution, autism, neuroscience – and then when the book was done, I genuinely forgot it and wanted a new topic. I re-immerse myself in something new. The way in which I work means there are very different things I’m trying that I haven’t done before.
I quite often have only a sense of the atmosphere of a novel when I begin. Watch Me Disappear, for instance [a novel about a marine biologist who returns to her hometown and is plagued by memories of her murdered childhood friend] – it was always going to be rather spooky, disturbing. Before I began that novel I had a sense of its atmosphere and flavour, and that, curiously, is often what I do have. I know I wanted The Great Lover [which focuses on the younger years of English poet Rupert Brooke] to have a flirtatious, subversive and surprising quality because I kept finding that in him.
KYD: I suppose if you set out, either consciously or unconsciously, to challenge yourself, nothing really gets easier from that point on?
JD: No. There’s a quote that goes, ‘We grow as writers when we do the thing we haven’t done before.’ I think it might be Henry James, but it’s probably a paraphrasing. And that is how it feels to me.
For example, I don’t often write in the third person and in my new novel I’m doing that, precisely because of that reason: it’s a challenge for me. I think the reason I don’t often do it is because when people write in third person, I find myself always thinking ‘Well, who’s saying this?’ [Laughs.] If you read a sentence like, ‘She walked into the room’, I’m thinking: ‘Says who?’ There’s something about the authority of that third person statement that’s always troubled me!
KYD: When I read that quote by John Self, one of the things that I thought did remain recognisable about your writing was the way in which many of your novels rework historical events and the lives of historical people. The Great Lover is of course about Rupert Brooke, Fred & Edie concerns Edith Thompson, who was executed for her role in her husband Percy’s murder, even Wild Boy takes the case of Victor, l’enfant sauvage. I read also that your 2006 novel Watch Me Disappear was derived from the real-life murder of 10-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in 2002.
JD: Yes. Well, it’s based on two murders, funnily enough. People often know of Wells and Chapman, the Soham murders. But actually, Watch Me Disappear is based strongly on the case of a woman who accused her father of murdering her school friend. I went and met that woman and talked to her – her name is Sandra Brown – and she was fantastically giving and willing to share. She had written her own book on that topic. My novel is very strongly based on her story, although publicity didn’t seem to pick up much on that.
KYD: I wonder why not? It seems like a publicist’s dream. 
JD: I know. I mean, I suppose I deliberately obscure things a little, and the Soham murders … I live near Soham. That myself always thinking ‘Well, who’s saying this?’ [Laughs.] If you read a sentence like, ‘She walked into the room’, I’m thinking: ‘Says who?’ There’s something about the authority of that third person statement that’s always troubled me!
KYD: When I read that quote by John Self, one of the things that I thought did remain recognisable about your writing was the way in which many of your novels rework historical events and the lives of historical people. The Great Lover is of course about Rupert Brooke, Fred & Edie concerns Edith Thompson, who was executed for her role in her husband Percy’s murder, even Wild Boy takes the case of Victor, l’enfant sauvage. I read also that your 2006 novel Watch Me Disappear was derived from the real-life murder of 10-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in 2002.
JD: Yes. Well, it’s based on two murders, funnily enough. People often know of Wells and Chapman, the Soham murders. But actually, Watch Me Disappear is based strongly on the case of a woman who accused her father of murdering her school friend. I went and met that woman and talked to her – her name is Sandra Brown – and she was fantastically giving and willing to share. She had written her own book on that topic. My novel is very strongly based on her story, although publicity didn’t seem to pick up much on that.
KYD: I wonder why not? It seems like a publicist’s dream.
JD: I know. I mean, I suppose I deliberately obscure things a little, and the Soham murders … I live near Soham. That children. Sandra works very much in that field now – she’s a social worker. She’d had hypnosis, interestingly, to access memories, and then she wasn’t sure that they were accurate anyway. In Watch Me Disappear, Tina has ‘sort-of ’ memories, but then again she has epilepsy, so you’re not sure if you can trust them. We’re never sure if we can trust our memories, are we? I liked that uncertainty in the novel, but I don’t really want to go there again!
KYD: No, I can imagine. What draws you to ‘write from history’, as it were?
JD: I think it’s a very powerful impulse in me. I rather resist and dislike novels where the plot is implausible. I feel the author has imposed what they would like to happen, or what they believe would happen. When we look around us, curiously, life is always more … I don’t know … strange.
I get very tired of crime dramas where – surprise, surprise – it’s always the woman who’s done it. I have written about women murderers, and I have investigated those very rare instances where women commit it. It’s a tiny number! In Britain, 88,000 people in prison are men, and 4000 are women. And of those 4000 very few will have committed a murder. And yet, if you put the telly on or watch a film, or read a book, it’s as if there’s a 50/50 chance that the woman will have done something shocking and extreme. Why are people not looking around at the world we live in? Because, really, how curious that it’s rare, and what is it about girls or women that makes us less inclined to murder? Is it nature or nurture? Are we given fewer opportunities? Are we nurtured away from violence? Are we given opportunities to express ourselves that boys don’t have, so we’re less likely to resort to violence? Is it because we’re born with less aggression? I really would like to know.
I want to investigate real events because I think they often tell you a real truth. This is often unavailable if you simply impose the storyline you want. So, for example … I have messed around with Rupert Brooke in The Great Lover, in that there wasn’t a maid that he fell in love with [Laughs]. But I did find letters from him where he mentioned noticing the maid. There was one letter where he said, ‘Oh, the maid’s very natty. I forgot to leave her a tip.’ It’s hilarious. So I thought it was conceivable that he was attracted to them and noticed them. The maids weren’t invisible to him. If I can find a lead that makes something plausible, I’ll go there. But if I had found nothing, if I had thought, ‘No, Rupert Brooke is the sort of man where, like a lot of men of his class, the maid would have been an invisibility’, then I wouldn’t have explored that. And yet he was interested in working-class people, and there is evidence of this.
I know that it’s maybe not an easy answer, but I do find myself thinking that if fiction works just to be neat, like in crime fiction – in the end the crime has been solved and order is restored – it doesn’t represent the world we live in. And I don’t really want to peddle that.
KYD: Your desire to work out of plausibility reminds me of Margaret Atwood, when she discussed writing Alias Grace. She said that she adopted a methodology where if there was a solid fact she couldn’t alter it, and everything in the book had to be suggested by something in the research.
JD: That’s exactly how I feel! How interesting. It’s the same with Fred & Edie. Doesn’t it irritate you when you see beautiful women, completely undamaged, middle-class, who could have any profession, who have been well-raised, depicted as murderers! [Laughs.] You do think, ‘No.’ In order to be Myra Hindley, or Edith Thompson – who, actually, I don’t think is a murderer – or Ruth Ellis, who I’ve also written about, there is usually some tremendous damage in the background. It’s true for men as well.
I do feel irritated with the easy trope of making murderers anyone who suddenly has a motive – usually jealousy or money. I just think that’s childish. That’s not why people commit murders.
KYD: There are always so many sociological factors involved.
JD: Totally. Do you know much about Ruth Ellis?
KYD: Not a great deal.
JD: Dance with a Stranger is the famous film about her, and she is depicted as very glamorous – and as basically a prostitute. Her murdered lover was called Blakely, and she had been severely beaten up by him many times. Actually, in the days before she killed him, he had punched her and she’d suffered a miscarriage. That never came out. I’m not making excuses for women; I still think you should serve a sentence for a crime. But it is a very different reality than Ellis tarting herself up and taking out a gun and going to blow his brains out. That’s the version you see in the film and that’s the version you read about.
KYD: Can you tell me a little about the relationship between research and fact and fiction in your novel Fred & Edie?
JD: I do agree with that Atwood statement. I won’t go anywhere unless I can find some corroborating suggestion or hint. Quite often I genuinely want to answer a question for myself, and I feel that by investigation and research I will. Not by imposing and cheating. Sometimes I think, ‘Oh, it would be better if I just changed it.’ I think it would be easier, but I would miss something. So I go and find things out.
So say with Edie Thompson… I remain really puzzled by this exchange of letters with her and Freddy [Bywaters]. What his letters might have said (because after all, they were not found and were not available), and what we might have believed if we had seen his. The feeling I had is that they had entered a game together, where he was saying ‘Let’s get rid of Percy’ [Edith’s husband] and she was playing along in order to keep Freddy interested. It’s not a crime to write a letter in which you playfully suggest bumping someone off. It is a crime if you do it and then the letters are found!
So at what point did Edith Thompson realise that Fred was serious and would actually do it? After all, he was 19! Who could ever believe that anyone would murder someone? None of us. If my 19-year-old son had said he wanted to kill someone at work, I wouldn’t have believed he meant it. There is something fascinating to me about this stage between fantasy and reality, and I think it remains a big question over the Thompson and Bywaters case.
To be so harshly judged as Thompson was on her sexuality, her looks, her brazenness, the fact that she was having an affair, the fact that she earned more than her husband… Other things she couldn’t talk about. She hinted that she was trying to procure an abortion (the herbs she talked about), but she was advised by her solicitor never to mention it. I mean, all of that research built such a vivid picture for me, but it did leave questions unanswered.
KYD: In puzzling over these questions, did you find that you were continually returning to the research? Did it change the direction of your writing?
JD: Yes. The funny thing is, I consider the process a logic of imagination. In that, it is where imagination eventually takes you when you fully immerse yourself in someone else’s story. I kept reading Edie’s letters… For example, there was one where the husband raped her. The letter is to Freddy and it’s coded. I didn’t push it entirely, but I wanted to give the reader the sense that perhaps the husband was much more brutal than came out in court. But again, I didn’t feel that I could overplay that. There is something about being faithful to the research that is part of my method and is very important to me. You keep going back into it and seeing what feels plausible. But it’s not just leaping anywhere you want to because it suits you. That feels a leap too far.
KYD: Do you feel that it’s an ethical imperative, or something that’s more attuned to verisimilitude?
JD: It feels like both. It feels like both an aesthetic and an ethical imperative. As in, yes I don’t want to cheat because real people are involved, and Edie Thompson had relatives. In fact, a nephew of Freddy’s popped out of the woodwork after I’d written the novel and wrote to me. But it’s also a compulsion of mine…
When I moved to London in my 20s I went to therapy for a very long time [Laughs]. And long after I felt I needed the therapy, I felt it was, intellectually, tremendously interesting and stimulating to look at the past again with fresh eyes. Go over and over a small incident and every time it appears differently. It’s never fixed. That, to me, is what I’m doing in fiction. I’ll be looking at a detail of Edie writing to Freddy, and one morning when I sit at my desk it seems this way, and the next morning it seems that way, and I’m trying to include all possibilities. It isn’t a closed text, where you can only have one interpretation. The reader can invest their own imagination and come up with a slightly different version. Some people, for example, said to me that they really warmed to Edie, and a lot of people tell me they cried when she was hanged. But people have also told me that they found her very irritating: how romantic, how foolish. I think that’s how it should be. If someone is real they should provoke different responses just as real people do.
KYD: Absolutely. I cried when I read Fred & Edie. But I don’t think it was because I didn’t see Edie as foolish. I think it’s all of the above. It’s a tragedy. You cry for her situation as much as her fate.
JD: Yes. Also, one thing I did very deliberately with Fred & Edie was in the title. I was thinking of titles like Romeo and Juliet or Oscar and Lucinda, or Antony and Cleopatra. Fred and Edie are such ordinary names. So plain. So clearly working class. And I wanted to suggest, for everyone, that in your own life your love story is the one. The one person you really fall for is a grand story for you. I don’t think we can judge Edith harshly for that. Freddy was her absolute love affair and there was a feeling in me that people would understand that. Edie invested quite an ordinary person – who goes and does a terrible thing – with rather magical properties: ‘He’ll rescue me and my life will be transformed.’ And sadly, it’s a million times worse than that. Everyone is affected. Percy is killed, two of the others are hanged, the rest of the family is devastated.
KYD: I know you’re interested in how highly subjective lived experience is.
JD: Yes.
KYD: Do you think historian
s can ever hope to capture the inner life of those they write about? For instance, could a biographer of Edith Thompson ever do something that a novelist can?
JD: I used to be more defensive about fiction and not make a great case for it. The older I get, the more I feel that fiction has absolutely its own truth and we can be allowed to say that. Why does it even exist as an art form? Why do we even need it? Precisely because it does this thing that other forms can’t. It’s about the incredibly personal inner imaginative life of an individual, isn’t it, effective fiction? We read wonderful novels from the past, like Madame Bovary, which I love, to be part of Emma’s world as Flaubert has given us it. Possibly it’s why I write in first person, this business of acknowledging subjective truth. But on the other hand, when I think of something like The Great Lover, I don’t feel I’m cheating because, after all, I’ve read as much as any biographer. In fact for The Great Lover I discovered some memoirs and a letter that hadn’t been included in Rupert Brooke’s biography…
KYD: [Laughs.]
JD: Which really pleased me… [Laughs.] Quite a lot of people who I thought might attack that book, biographers such as Frances Spalding, didn’t. Spalding was fantastic about it. And I do feel that I really did achieve something, perhaps through my thoroughness. Through not cheating. For example, people are always asking about Rupert Brooke’s sexuality, and I think in fiction you don’t need to make a statement. I don’t need to write in the third person, ‘Well, Rupert Brooke was clearly bisexual’, or ‘Rupert Brooke might have had sexual experiences with men but his feelings were towards women’. I never need to express it that plainly. I can just show the reader all the feelings he had – he had this love affair with a boy, he had love affairs with women – and they will come to their own conclusion, which may differ in each instance. Fiction is a lovely way of not having to quite nail your colours to the mast, but to just let things be.
In the novel Rupert Brooke is not presented as exactly the laudable figure that people might imagine. In many ways he has lots of failings. People don’t know much about his breakdown. He could be anti-Semitic, which was quite an awkward thing to include. He could be tremendously sexist and arrogant. If you edit all that out it isn’t truthful. But if you can show people that he was also charming and often seemed to win people over despite all his failings, he remains interesting.
KYD: Something that many admire about your work is what UK journalist and writer Polly Samson has called your ‘literary ventriloquism’ – your ability to not only create believable voices for your characters but to inhabit them in a way that is utterly convincing. Can you tell me a little bit about how you create authentic narrative voice?
JD: It does interest me immensely. As with acting, you have to get inside someone and start to think how they would think. Sometimes there is an impulse – you think, ‘Oh, I can’t write that.’ But if your character would think it, you have to be bold. So say with Lucky Bunny [which focuses on Queenie Dove, a fictional thief born in London’s east end in 1933], my difficulty was that I wanted Queenie to insist that – like all the criminal memoirs that I read did – everything was fine and that this was a great life, and she was an absolute survivor and boy, was she successful. But I also wanted the reader to know that, in actuality, her life was really hard – she came from very poor beginnings, her father was a git, her mother was a nightmare – and for them to make their own view, rather than adopt Queenie’s.
You have to trust that your intelligent, intuitive reader will hear the narrative voice but understand its unreliability. When you’ve let go of that concern you can have great fun with voice. I made Queenie very, very sassy. You could imagine someone like her telling you until they’re blue in the face that everything is great with the world. I wanted to mimic the voice found in a lot of criminal memoirs of the time, but to have more subtlety; for the reader to know that there’s more going on than what she’s telling you.
KYD: Do you find that the first-person voice arrives organically, or is it something that you have to redraft several times? Do you walk around the room, talking to yourself ?
JD: A lot of that actually! [Laughs.] A lot of redrafting and saying things aloud. I always feel that I have to warm into the voice, and then I can usually write a long chunk in it. It can be quite a difficult thing to sustain throughout a whole novel because each time you go back to it – as I think any writer knows – the tone has often shifted and it doesn’t sound the same. It’s very infuriating. I usually end up cutting a chunk until the voice starts to come through again … I think of it as ‘coming through’, like I’m a medium or something [Laughs].
When I was writing The Great Lover, because I was reading Rupert Brooke’s letters repeatedly I could hear him in my head. I could hear how he would phrase things. His syntax was a little unusual. Where I might have said, ‘women are very beautiful’, he would have said ‘there’s beauty in women’. It’s a very subtle difference, but that’s how I began to hear it, in the word order that he would have used. So that’s what’s going on for me. It’s partly research and partly tuning in.
KYD: I notice that many of your characters are quite conscious of the way language includes or excludes them. Why do you think this is? Do you see this feature in your novels, or am I reading into things?
JD: No, I think that’s a brilliant remark. Nobody else has commented on it and I think it’s very true.
I think I often give a character my own interest in language and the way in which it has struck me. But I think the other thing I’m often working with, definitely in Fred & Edie and Wild Boy, and Nell [in The Great Lover], is the idea of an uneducated person who is intelligent and articulate in their own right, but who hasn’t been given access to the language of books or education, and who is feeling excluded by that. Actually, I think that’s because of my own background. I was the first child in the family to go to university, but I was surrounded by very intelligent people. I mean, I once had a boyfriend who couldn’t read or write. And yet he had a fantastic way with metaphor. He was fantastically poetic in his everyday language, which fascinates me.
KYD: I was reading some of the comments by the Whitbread Book Award [now the Costa Book award] judges, and they said that in Fred & Edie you had ‘discovered a female language which picks up where Jean Rhys left off’.
JD: That’s a nice quote.
KYD: I thought it fascinating, because a female language, by definition, departs from the dominant language. It exists on the periphery. And I wanted to know whether this was something you sought to achieve in Fred & Edie?
JD: I am conscious of it. And seeking it. My grandmother was a Geordie woman who made the
most fantastic, hilarious metaphors. I remember asking her, when I was a little girl, why her knickers were so huge when I saw the washing on the line. And she said, ‘Oh, it’s to keep the sun out of my eye.’ [Laughs]. Such a random, odd remark. But it was typical of things she would say. I was always conscious of a language outside of an educated language. One that was playful and could convey humour, personality – a vernacular voice.
KYD: Characters who are slightly subversive, or who are outsiders – and I think many of your characters are – can’t often access the dominant language, and they’re very conscious of it. Many of your character are anxious about it.
JD: Exactly. And also, it is a language that excludes, isn’t it? If you meet anyone from Oxford or Cambridge, the ways in which they refer to their university experience is tremendously coded so that those who also went are at ease with it. But no one else is. I think that’s typical of the way in which language operates to keep people out, or to convey class.
Look at someone like Edith Thompson, who was trying to better herself. She was trying to learn French, and she wanted to wear beautiful things and be a more sophisticated figure, so I think she would have been tremendously conscious of the ways in which certain words would give her access to that world. I think it’s a really interesting observation, and I definitely think it’s been going on in my work but I don’t know how consciously I’ve looked at it. I think it’s simply what I know. It’s what I’ve observed.
KYD: What does your writing day look like?
JD: I currently teach creative writing on a Monday and a Tuesday, so my writing days are Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, which feels fantastic. It feels like a lot. I’ve never had a full week, even though I’ve been self-employed and a full- time writer since forever. There’s always been something interfering in one way or another.
For the last 10 years, since we’ve been living here in the Fens, I’ve had a lovely study at the top of the house. I make proper coffee where I grind the beans, and I really treat myself so that it’s a pleasure rather than a chore [Laughs]. I light a candle. The room is very nice. And if I’m writing I try not to do anything first. I think if you do emails, or… Say today, for example, I won’t write my novel because I’ve engaged a different side of myself, a different brain. I think writing is better for me when it feels a bit dreamier, a bit closer to ‘I’ve just woken up and I’m just playing.’ So the best writing happens when I’m still in my pyjamas, and I haven’t had to go anywhere. And then, usually, I sit down, a lot comes out at once, I type incredibly fast so I can produce a lot, and then the next time I read it through I’ll edit it. It’s always recursive. I’m writing then editing, endlessly.
My tip for all writers is the one I find most useful, which is to keep a separate journal about the writing of the novel. I endlessly refer back to those, because I find them very comforting. Recently, at around the 50,000 word mark, I felt very stuck, and I looked back at the journals for Wild Boy and Watch Me Disappear, and in both of them I see that I always get stuck at this point. And I realise that there’s often a waiting period where you feel you’re treading water, before the novel goes into its next phase. I find my journals remind me of things that I’ve forgotten.
KYD: You mention teaching two days a week, and I know that you’ve held the creative writing fellowship at the University of East Anglia, and that you’ve taught for the MA there. Now, it’s a very popular question, but do you believe that writing can be taught?
JD: I think there’s a hell of a lot you can teach. But whether people have the ability to write is always evident very early on. You can find, even in the most untutored person, some fantastic imagery, a wonderful voice, or something. And that cannot be taught. But I think there’s plenty that can be, and probably what you’re doing with students is steering their reading, making them question things, making them more conscious of what they’re doing. That’s what I see my job as. You’re encouraging the interrogation of their work.
But energy, ability with language, or a feel for language, original observations about people – none of that can be taught. But a person who possesses these things still has to work tremendously hard. Talent doesn’t guarantee publication, as we all know.
I’m doing a lot of mentoring for a scheme I developed called Gold Dust. In the past I was someone who would have been more willing to say writing could be taught. I think now, being more circumspect, there’s plenty of things I can’t teach.
KYD: Jill, you’ve been twice-nominated for the Orange Prize, and in Australia there’s been a movement to establish a similar women-only literary award: The Stella Prize. How have your nominations affected your career, and what would you say to the naysayers?
JD: I think it has made a huge difference and I am tremendously grateful for the nominations. The Orange Prize nomination for Fred & Edie transformed my career. I’m really sure that I was taken more seriously as a result. But I was also nominated for the Whitbread that year, and I often feel that one prize brings others. For example, Andrea Levy’s novel, Small Island, having been shortlisted for the Orange went on to win all sorts of things. Such a prize is actually saying ‘these books are being overlooked’, either because they’re by writers you haven’t heard of who happen to be women, or because they are on topics that you have decided to relegate and not consider as universal because they particularly affect women.
A.S. Byatt has famously said that she doesn’t want to be put in for the Orange Prize. But her career was absolutely secured long ago. She doesn’t need the Orange Prize, whereas for many writers that isn’t true, and I think they benefit hugely. I think it’s transformative.
KYD: Your eighth novel, The Tell-Tale Heart… Can you tell us a little about what it will focus on?
JD: It’s simply, at the moment, a ghost story. It’s set here in the Fens. I think it’s best if I say the least possible, really. It’s currently an odd novel, and I’m not sure that it will be the same one that I deliver next year. I think the character may or may not be going mad. I’m really very uncertain. But that is the way I work. There’s such a lot of reconfiguring between the concept and what it ends up as. But it was sold as a ghost story set here in the Fens. That is what my publisher has bought … But whether that’s what they’ll get is another thing entirely! [Laughs].
KYD: That’s perhaps a good place to leave things.
JD: It was so good to talk to you!
KYD: Well, thank you, Jill. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
