Stoke Newington author Christina Patterson on her tragic family memoir

My mother was Swedish, my father Scottish. They met in Germany, got married in Sweden and lived in Bangkok and then Rome. I was born in Rome and spent most of my childhood in Surrey.

But for me Hackney is home.

My father was with me on the day, nearly 25 years ago, when I first saw the flat in Stoke Newington where I still live. We went for lunch at the Blue Legume.

After I moved in, my family came to visit and we went for a walk in Abney Park Cemetery and looked at the graves of the hymn writer Isaac Watts, the lion tamer Frank Bostock and Joanna Vassa, the daughter of Olaudah Equiano, the writer and freed slave.Christina with her parents and siblings, she has endured the loss of family members and her own cancer diagnosis (Image: Courtesy of Christina Patterson)

Wherever you go in Stoke Newington, you are walking on layers of history. The high street was once a Roman road, and the common is one of the most important Paleolithic sites in Northern Europe. The area has been home to many free thinkers and dissenters, including the great preacher John Wesley, leading abolitionists like James Stephen, and writers like Mary Wollstonecraft and Daniel Defoe.

I loved the thought that I was walking in the footsteps of writers because I had dreamt of being a writer since I was a child. A year after I moved here, I was thrilled to get a job as director of The Poetry Society. I would get the 73 bus to the office in Covent Garden and after work I’d meet friends for a drink at the Three Crowns. My bubble of happiness burst the day my father phoned me at work to tell me that my sister, Caroline, had collapsed and died.

My sister’s funeral was the first I ever attended. Two years later, my father died, of cancer of the colon, which spread to the lungs and then brain. Nine months after that, I found a lump in my breast. On the day I went to Homerton hospital to get the results of the scan, I had lunch with my mother at YumYum.

I tried to put on a brave face as I twirled the noodles in my Pad Thai. I wanted to smash the plates and scream that it was all too much: too much for my mother to lose a daughter and a husband in just two years and now face losing her other daughter, too. Too much for her, and too much for me.

I remember my first walk round Clissold Park after I got the all-clear. There were children playing in the paddling pool, families having barbecues, and couples kissing on the grass. I felt drunk with the joy of being alive, and in this place which offers such a heady mix: of old and new, of smart and scruffy, of green and urban and, of course, of cultures.

Where else do you find mosques in the same road as synagogues, just round the corner from a Pentecostal church? And where else can you nip out and satisfy your craving for almost any world cuisine? For me, there’s nowhere else that has that breadth, that buzz.

It's 20 years since that walk round Clissold Park. I wish I could say they have been a picnic. They haven’t. I got cancer again. I had surgery again. I got my dream job, as a writer and columnist on a national newspaper, and lost it. My mother died. And then, in July 2019, my beloved brother died of a heart attack while he was on the phone. When coronavirus hit a few months later, I thought: well, I’ve had my pandemic already.Christina's book describes losing her siblings and parents but remaining resilient and hopeful in the face of terrible grief (Image: Courtesy of the publisher)

That was when I decided I had to tell the story of my family. It’s the story of a suburban childhood disrupted by unforeseen events: my sister’s breakdown at fourteen, and my search for teenage romance, which took a very unexpected turn. It’s a book about how we cope when life goes wrong, where we find joy and what we mean by love.

Although I started the book when I was in a state of grief, I found the process of writing it a pure joy. It was a friend who came up with the title: Outside, the Sky is Blue. I thought it was perfect because I do believe, at a profound level, that behind the clouds, the sun is always there and the sky is a deep, pure blue.

Outside, the Sky is Blue (Tinder Press, £10.99) is out now in paperback.