Polly's Story by Jennie Walters

The ‘Swallowcliffe Hall’ trilogy: ‘Polly’s Story’, ‘Grace’s Story’, ‘Isobel’s Story’

It was dates that inspired me to write my three ‘Swallowcliffe Hall’ books. I suddenly realized that a young Victorian girl could have had a daughter of that age in 1914, on the brink of the First World War, and a grand-daughter her age in 1939, on the eve of the Second. So there was the timeline for my three novels: these fascinating periods of history. I decided to root the stories in a grand old English country house, large enough to accommodate an army of servants besides the aristocratic family who’ve lived there for generations. I wanted the house to become another character, regarded in a very different light by each of my three heroines. Polly, who comes to the house as under-housemaid in 1890, wants nothing more than to stay there and serve the Vye family for the rest of her life. Her daughter Grace, a reluctant kitchenmaid, is stifled and suffocated by the Hall; she manages to find work in the stables when the male servants go off to fight in the war, but still feels the restrictions of servant life – especially when she falls in love with a member of the Vye family, and he with her. And although Grace is determined her own daughter, Isobel, will have nothing to do with Swallowcliffe, she has no choice but to send her there to convalesce after a bout of TB in 1939, when the country is on the brink of war. Isobel is captivated by the Hall’s crumbling beauty and the chance of sanctuary it provides for Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe.

Each girl’s reaction to the house and to the world of service gave me a clue into her character, a starting point to examine all sorts of other thoughts and emotions. I became fascinated by the way in which the world changed between 1890 and 1939, all in the lifetime of my first heroine, and realized my own grandmother had lived through the same tumultuous time. If only I could have asked her about it! I also loved finding out about the strict code that governed the servants’ hall in a big country house: the upper servants departing to take their pudding in the housekeeper’s parlour, the under-housemaids who were only allowed to dust the legs of drawing-room furniture rather than the surface, the condescending ‘Rules for the manners of servants in good families’: do not smile at droll stories told at the table, do not enter into conversation with your mistress, give any information required in as few words as possible. ‘Downton Abbey’ has its appeal, but it’s just as well those days have gone and we’re living in more open, fairer times today.

For a wealth of background information into the stories, including original photographs, extracts from servants’ letters, and much more, visit

www.jenniewalters.com

where you can also purchase the book as an e-book or in print

Jubilee by Eliza Graham

I live in a very beautiful part of the South of England, very close to White Horse Hill in what used to be Berkshire and is now Oxfordshire. I’ve always been aware of just how long human beings have lived here. Up on the hill stretches the White Horse itself, which predates Abraham. Wayland’s Smithy, the mysterious Sarcen stone burial site, is about three miles from my house.

My first two novels were set in Dorset and West Poland (formerly German Pomerania) respectively. When it came to my third book, Jubilee, I wanted to write about where I live, about the hills and fields I see every day when I’m walking my dog.

As I strode through fields of sheep I thought back to the families who’d farmed up here in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, as livestock and farming methods improved. Some of them had lived here for centuries. They’d just weathered the slumps after the first world war when the second world war started. Life changed. Prisoners of war from Germany, Austria and Italy came to work on the farms. Evacuees arrived from London. Some of the local young men who’d signed up died or faced years of imprisonment in European and Asian POW camps.

I thought of a protagonist for this new book: Jubilee, He’d be Robert Winter, a young yeoman farmer, not quite gentry, but well-placed in the village. A member of the local cricket team. Someone who’d spent his youth out on the hills with the sheep. Someone who’d seen the tough side of life and probably come across a few people he didn’t much like but generally thought of other human beings as reasonable.

Put a man like this, a man more sensitive and highly strung than might have been imagined, into a Japanese POW camp where he witnesses atrocities and deprivation. Where his own health suffers. He survives his incarceration and comes back to his picturesque farm on the Downs. He knows he’s fortunate, that he should be grateful, that he should pick up where he left off, throwing himself into the rhythms of the farming year.

But he can’t. What happened to him in his camp in Thailand is still replaying itself in his mind. Every night he goes to sleep and ghosts come out to reproach or taunt him. Still living on the farm are the young evacuees who arrived in 1939, now older, but still expecting to pick up the relationship they’d developed with Robert before he went away. They grow increasingly scared as his mood swings and delusions grow more intense.

I’d chosen jubilees as the linking theme for this book, though it has nothing to do with the monarchs themselves. For small villages in this part of the world coronations, royal weddings and jubilees are a kind of glue that binds the community together. People come out and celebrate. Bunting goes up. Cakes are baked. I used the coronation in 1953, the silver jubilee in 1977, and the golden jubilee in 2002 to show how the past informs the present, how people go into the future always half-looking behind them at what’s passed.

Jubilee was at proof stage by August 2009, the sixtieth anniversary of the start of the second world war. On the morning of Bank Holiday Monday I was vacuuming my house before we were to go down to the local agricultural show: an annual family excursion. Someone knocked on the door. A man in his seventies was standing there. He told me he’d come to live in this very cottage as an evacuee in September 1939 and had returned to the area this weekend as there was going to be a sixtieth anniversary commemoration of the evacuees’ arrival in the village primary school.

Goosebumps pricked on my skin as he told me about life in the cottage during the war, about the Italian POWs in the camp 100 metres down the road from us. I’d fallen into my own book! Jubilee had come alive in a way I’d never expected.

www.elizagraham.co.uk