Women on the Home Front (164 page)

Q.
How did you get the idea for The War Widows? Did it come to you as a complete story, a character, a theme?

A. I was in a swimming pool in Crete talking to a fellow guest who was half Cretan. She told me how her mother arrived alone into Manchester airport after the war and no one was there to greet her. Suddenly the idea came: what if…? I sat down and wrote the basic story line there and then. It pays always to have a notebook handy with your sunscreen. It came complete with all the main characters and the local setting I knew from childhood. The idea of
The War Widows
just grew out of this.

Q.
What research did you do writing The War Widows?

A. Lots of reading about the Burma Campaign, the Battle of Crete and Austerity Britain. And research on food shortages and rationing and Mediterranean cooking-this of course needed tasting in Crete!

Q.
What is your daily writing routine?

A. I write my journal early in the morning, noting dreams and ideas that come first thing. Nothing is lost then while I mess about doing chores until after nine and then write, research or read for most of the day. I keep office hours, being a morning person. If I work in the evening, I don’t sleep at all.

Q.
Do you draw upon your own experiences with family and friends as you create characters and plots?

A. I may borrow bits of real people, steal bits of their lives but prefer to wait to see who turns up in my books and why. Once I have their name, the person seems to
appear fully formed. A lot of my own life experiences are woven into my novels, transformed into something quite different by the time I’ve played about with things, e.g. I was a dancing child and the studio described is the one I attended as a toddler as was the ice-cream parlour.

Q. Which character do you feel most connected to and why?

A. I feel close to Lily because she’s someone I’ve met many times over, the woman who puts everyone’s needs before her own. I loved watching her transform from a doormat into a feisty independent woman able to make some better choices for herself. We are not related however. Anyone who knows me will soon tell you that.

Q. Who are your literary influences?

A. I suppose my literary influences are found in the wide variety of genres I read for pleasure: crime writers with a strong sense of place like Stephen Booth, Lesley Horton, Reginald Hill. I love the stories of Daphne Du Maurier, Elizabeth Goudge, Maeve Binchy, the prose of Susan Hill, Penelope Lively, Margaret Forster, Laurie Graham, Fannie Flagg, Barbara Kingsolver. I’d better stop there.

Q. What are you working on next?

A. I’m writing another Yorkshire Dales story about the lives of a bunch of evacuees who arrive in a hostel in a small market town in 1940. Two of the girls, from different backgrounds, swear eternal friendship but in later life rivalry and misunderstanding change this with tragic consequences. Also in my notepad are the stirrings of a natural sequel to
The War Widows
when the next generation of Winstanleys start to grow up in the 50s and 60s, unaware of their big family secret.

A chance encounter in a swimming pool in north-west Crete sparked off this story. Thank you Helena Charlton (wherever you are now) for sharing some of your history and giving me the idea. Thank you Manolis, Sofia and Marialena-the Tsompanakis family-for your wonderful hospitality and friendship.

Once again I’ve borrowed some of the landscapes from my home town, Bolton, but none of its people. I have used the premises of the Sabini ice cream parlour as I recall it as a child but my Santini family and their history is a figment of my imagination and their ice cream sodas could never have tasted as good as the ones I slurped through a straw all those years ago.

I am indebted to the following books for information:

A Detail on the Burma Front
by Winifred Beaumont (BBC Books)

Wings of an Angel
by Colin Barrett (Vanguard Books)

A Burmese Legacy
by Su Arnold (Coronet Books 1996)

Chindhe Women (The Women’s Auxiliary Service Burma)
by Sally and Lucy Jaffe

Crete: 1941 Eyewitnessed
(Efstathiadis Group)

Crete: The Battle of the Resistance
by Anthony Beevor (Penguin Books 1991)

Once again many thanks to Maxine Hitchcock, Sammia Rafique and the team at Avon for all their enthusiasm and help.

Leah Fleming was born in Lancashire of Scottish parents, and is married with four grown-up children and five grandchildren. She writes full-time from a haunted farmhouse in the Yorkshire Dales and from the slopes of an olive grove in Crete.

Find out more about Leah at www.leahfleming.co.uk and visit www.AuthorTracker.co.uk for exclusive updates on Leah Fleming.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

AVON

A division of HarperCollins
Publishers
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London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Leah Fleming 2008

Leah Fleming asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-84756-013-1

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EPub Edition © 2009 ISBN: 9780007334971