Selected passages from my books.
An Eye for Detail
As a young child in industrial Dowlais, Eliza Turner begins to draw the world around her. Before long, her parents realise that their daughter sees things others miss.
An extract from Unseen Souls
The first time Sian noticed Eliza’s fascination with shapes was when she caught her tracing crude, uneven circles in the soot on the windowsill.
At first, she dismissed it as idle child’s play. But as the months passed, the marks grew more deliberate and thoughtful.
For Eliza’s third birthday, Rhys made her a small blackboard from a slate tile, along with chalk he’d salvaged from the ironworks.
Eliza would sit cross-legged by the hearth, brow furrowed in earnest concentration, dragging the chalk across the slate.
Sian smiled softly the first time she saw a jagged circle, uneven lines sprouting from its centre like spokes on a wheel.
‘What’s that, then?’ Sian asked gently, kneeling beside her.
‘A flower,’ Eliza replied shyly, pressing harder as she made another mark. ‘Like the one in the jar.’
Sian glanced at the fading bluebell Rhys had picked the night before, and kissed her daughter’s hair.
‘It’s a good likeness, cariad.’
Soon, Eliza’s scribbles became more than play and she started to draw with slow, deliberate strokes.
Sian, sewing nearby, watched discreetly. Eliza’s tongue peeked out in concentration, and when she turned the slate towards her mother, it displayed sharp, angular lines.
‘It’s the mountain,’ Eliza said proudly pointing to the jagged peaks. ‘Like outside.’
Sian studied the slate carefully. The lines were rough, but unmistakably shaped like the hills surrounding Dowlais.
’That’s lovely, Eliza. You’ve got sharp eyes, haven’t you cariad?’
That evening, Sian showed Rhys the slate. He tilted it towards the firelight, looking closely at what his daughter had drawn.
‘That’s something,’ he murmured, glancing fondly at Eliza, who now sketched earnestly on a scrap of paper.
‘She’s got something, Sian. D’you think she was born with a gift?’
Sian hesitated.
She thought of the long hours spent sewing by dim lamplight, her fingers sore from stitching endless repairs into trousers and aprons, and Rhys’s calloused hands, forever blackened by coal dust and soot.
Eliza’s soft, tiny hands seemed almost miraculous in comparison.
‘Maybe,’ she whispered. ‘Or maybe she just sees what we miss.’
Rhys chuckled softly, pride warming his voice.
‘She’s got your eyes and my stubbornness. Poor girl doesn’t stand a chance.’
In the months that followed, Eliza’s drawings became a quiet comfort to them both, a reminder that life held more than daily struggle.
Her sketches, though unrefined, possessed a kind of vitality.
It wasn’t just what she drew, but how she captured them, as though her small world demanded to be seen.
‘She’ll go far, our Eliza,’ Rhys would often say, and Sian nodded, and she prayed he was right.
The cottage still hummed with its usual rhythm of mending, scrubbing and keeping the fire lit.
Eliza was quiet by nature, but her curiosity lit the house like sunlight through soot.
Despite her exhaustion, Sian nurtured that spark, smiling as Eliza handed her crooked fabric scraps stitched into misshapen quilts ’for the cat,’ she said proudly.
Sometimes, when the day had been especially hard, Sian knelt beside Eliza, guiding her daughter’s tiny hand to form smoother lines, or helping her shape familiar faces.
These quiet moments were their refuge from the noise and grind outside.
As Eliza’s sixth birthday approached, Sian was pregnant again. And Eliza, ever forthright, had questions.
‘Why is your belly so big, Mam?’ she asked earnestly one day, eyes wide with wonder.
‘Because Bronwyn is certain you’re getting a sister,’ Sian explained gently, guiding Eliza’s hand to feel the baby’s movements.
‘She’ll need you as a big sister to teach her all the clever things you’ve learned. Like drawing your pretty pictures.’
Eliza lit up at that, even if she didn’t really understand what it meant.
She began making drawings ‘for the baby,’ filling her slate with flowers, radiant suns, and stick-figure families reaching lovingly for one another.
Even then, Eliza’s art was a mirror. The shadows and soot of the ironworks crept into the corners of her sketches, alongside the faces of her parents: her mother’s skilled fingers threading a needle, her father’s sturdy hands lifting her high above his head. They were small things, drawn from instinct. But they said more than most words could.
Her early pictures were clumsy, of course. But her eye was already different and her attention unnervingly precise.
Rhys would often shake his head, half in wonder.
‘She doesn’t just look, Sian, she sees. That’s rare, isn’t it?’
Sian would nod, pride tempered with worry because gifts like that didn’t always survive in places like Dowlais…