Behind the Scenes

On the Home Front

It was only once I had submitted to my editor The Soldier's Return – the final novel in the Woodicombe House trilogy – that I realised I was going to sorely miss the characters about whom I had spent the previous eighteen months writing. I found myself wondering what they would have gone on to do next. Naomi and Kate were still young women, certainly young enough to fear for their children once it became apparent that war was again edging over the horizon. Knowing the characters and their circumstances, I was confident that, when the call came, Kate and Naomi's offspring wouldn't hesitate to step up. Thus, a new trilogy, On the Home Front, took shape, the first two stories unfolding in parallel and linked by a couple of shared events. Before I knew it, my characters' lives and their quiet corner of Devon were once again being rocked by the events of war.

Her Patriotic Duty

Naomi's daughter, Esme, was always going to be wilful and independent, with a strong sense of right and wrong. Given her upbringing, she was also going to struggle to fit her family's expectations of her. I'd previously read about the Special Operations' Executive (SOE), discovering biographies and novels that had already been written on the subject - and written very well. By chance, among material on SOE operations, I stumbled across just a half a dozen lines about Decoy Women. It was, in part, the dearth of information about these women, and the role they apparently played, that made me seize upon the opportunity for Esme, the lack of hard facts enabling me to develop her work – and the repercussions arising from it – into a story about what happens when duty to family and country conflict.

Her Heart's Choice 

Lou's wartime role was always going to be more low key than Esme's, Lou being far less worldly than her London cousin. The fact that Lou was approaching the age when she could be called up for war work presented a legitimate reason for me to have her leave home; without the war, she would most likely have remained in the village where she'd grown up. In order to write a sufficiently different tale to Her Patriotic Duty, the character of Lou needed a job that was nothing like  Esme's - indeed, a job that Esme would have found unbearably mundane. At the time, Plymouth naval dockyard - a world away from where Lou had been raised – was recruiting young women, in their droves, to replace the men who had gone to war. What better chance for Lou to blossom into womanhood, dicing with danger as she did so? The real life Canadian naval presence in Plymouth at the time was just the icing on the cake, presenting me with the chance to bring Lou's coming of age to a satisfying conclusion.

Ties That Bind

Initially, the On the Home Front series was going to comprise just two books. But, as I fleshed out the synopsis for Her Heart's Choice, I realised I was missing the opportunity to bring the story of the women of Woodicombe House – and of their wartime trials and tribulations – to a decisive close. Both Lou and Esme still had struggles to face but, with peacetime in sight, it seemed the perfect time to bring back a couple of characters from the earlier books and, in doing so, tie up the family's loose ends...