Sarah Meyrick
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Memories of India

5/22/2019

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My character Hope – Edward’s daughter – goes to India in the late 1960s, just at the time it was becoming popular to travel overland to Asia. 

​Hope sets off on a whim, without any real thought, and as a result is hopelessly unprepared for what she faces when she arrives. She’s appalled by the dirt and the poverty she encounters, and she also falls ill as so many western travellers do. After a pretty rough time she arrives at the Gordon Hospital where one of her sisters is serving as a nurse.

 
This picture is a real hospital in India. It houses a clinic for sufferers of leprosy, a disease which has carried a terrible stigma for centuries. It is particularly prevalent in the north east corner of India, in the impoverished state of Bihar.
 
This particular hospital was founded by an inspirational Roman Catholic priest, Brother Christdas, and was ground-breaking in its vision to establish a community of leprosy sufferers who would be treated with dignity and respect, and receive the treatment they needed.
 
I spent three months here as a volunteer about fifteen years after Hope’s trip. It was inspiring, life-changing even. But for ‘soft’ westerners, conditions were pretty basic. We lived in mud huts and drew water from the village pump. From time to time, we visited a nearby mission hospital, funded by American money, and considerably more sophisticated. I remember the pleasure of running water, a flush toilet and ceiling fans to keep away the worst of heat. They had tiles on the floor instead of dirt.
 
The hospital where Hope and Faith end up is more like the American one than the village I stayed in. I remember how struck I was by the redefinition of luxury, when life is stripped down to the basics. Hope’s story is not my own, but my experience provides a jumping- off point. Her time in India is, to some degree, a turning point for her. In my experience, however short, however superficial, India’s a bit like that: it stops you in your tracks.
 

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The research behind 'The Restless Wave'

5/11/2019

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​Every novel requires a lot of research. In the case of this book, the action takes place over the space of a century. So that required really quite a lot of homework.
 
Some of this was simply historical. Much of the action of the book takes place around D-Day and the Normandy Landings. An enormous amount has been written about the Second World War, of course, so that is relatively straightforward. What’s much more complex is pulling together all the little details that make the narrative feel authentic. What slang was used in 1944? What was fashionable womenswear in 1959? What was going on in the field of education in 2016?
 
Then there’s the question of how much detail you need to go into. As a novelist you are trying to tell a story, not write a history book. But the more you probe, the more you realise you don’t know. It’s very easy to get bogged down to the point where you feel utterly swamped.
 
But it was a lot of fun, too. I love learning about new things. And I made some rather wonderfully serendipitous discoveries along the way.
 
Edward, one of my three main characters, was a chaplain in the Second World War, and like many other padres, accompanied the troops into Normandy on D-Day. I knew a fair amount about the Battle of Normandy thanks to visiting the museums and memorials that pepper the Normandy coastline over many years, but I didn’t know anything about chaplains. I spent a fascinating morning at the Museum of Army Chaplaincy in Hampshire, with its curator, David Blake. (He was so helpful he gets a name check in the story itself, as well as in the acknowledgements.)
 
Thanks to him, I met a woman called Jenni Crane, whose discovery of a leather suitcase in a junk shop in 2014 led to her search for its former owner, the Revd George Parry, who as killed on D-day aged just 29. Through Jenni I met a lovely man called Frank Treble, whose own father had also been a D-day chaplain. Frank very generously gave me a copy of his father’s unpublished memoir – and gave me his full permission to pillage it. Which I did.
 
And it was while I was reading the diary of another D-day padre in the Bodleian Library in Oxford one day that I came across the name of my own uncle, a Major John Hanson-Lawson. I had no idea he had served at D-day, and he died many years ago. Thanks to Facebook, I managed to track down his only son, my step-cousin, who lives in Hong Kong, and he confirmed that yes, this was his father, and yes, he had indeed served at D-day.
 
Perhaps most curiously, David also told me about a pre-invasion training school for chaplains where the chosen few were put through their paces between March and May 1944. Being picked for this training was quite prestigious. It was also no picnic: live ammunition was used and at least one hapless padre was seriously injured in the process. And guess what? The village where this took place is barely six miles from where I lived at the time, in Northamptonshire.
 
More remarkably still, just a few weeks before my conversation with David, my husband and I were driving down the A5 a stone’s throw from that village when we were stopped by a road block. My husband got chatting with the policeman who was directing the traffic. We assumed there’d been a road accident, but no. The hold-up was all because Army bomb disposal officers were safely detonating an explosive device that had lingered in the field until modern times. It seemed that the more deeply I delved, the more serendipitous my desire to tell this story began to feel.
 
In the end, I accumulated much more research than I actually used, but I’m sure that’s necessary. I had to remind myself that I was writing a novel, not a historical guide. Nonetheless I wanted to know enough to avoid making too many obvious howlers. Fingers crossed….

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The idea that sparked the story

5/8/2019

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​People often ask writers where they get their ideas from.
 
One answer is that I’ve no idea. Another is that ideas are all around us. You only have to read a newspaper, watch the news, talk to a colleague, overhear your neighbour’s conversation on the train. Personally, I always seem have to have a hundred ideas bubbling around. Not all of them will make it into a book, of course. But, for me, at any rate, ideas almost always begin with curiosity. I wonder why someone might do that… I wonder what that feels like… I wonder what would happen if…
 
For me, ‘What if…?’ is almost inevitably the starting point. I can’t imagine how you become a writer unless you are incurably curious. (That’s a polite way of saying ‘nosy’). Curious about the world, curious about people. Curious about what makes people tick. The same reasons as I became a journalist – a love of language and indefatigable curiosity – have propelled me into writing fiction.
 
Naively, it seems, I’ve been surprised by how often readers assume that a writer’s work is autobiographical. Only last weekend, referring to my first book Knowing Anna, my aunt said to me, ‘Tell me about Anna. I’m guessing she was a friend of yours.’ She was surprised – and I think a little disappointed – that the answer was no.
 
Of course, of course you draw on your own experience when you’re writing. But it would be pretty dull, surely, if you just rehashed bits of your life? Well, I'm not sure my life has been that fascinating anyway, to anyone else but me. ‘If it hasn't happened to you, how do you know about x, then?’ I was asked at one point. I confess I was taken aback. The answer, I suppose, is research and a bit of imagination. Is it such a great secret that a writer of fiction makes stuff up? 

Anyway, where did I get the idea for The Restless Wave?
 
Well, the starting point was my first book. If you’ve read Knowing Anna, you may remember Anna’s father, William, had a rather overbearing father, who found it hard to settle back in to family life after seeing action in the Second World War. Specifically, he’d been an army chaplain at the Battle for Normandy in the summer of 1944. In Anna, William’s father only merited three paragraphs. But increasingly I found myself wondering about this as yet unnamed man. Who was he? Had the War changed him or had he always been like that? And if so, what had happened? I wanted to know.
 
I’m also interested in what we pass down the generations in our families. Aside from our genes, there are the values and the interests we pass on in an intentional way. But what about the things that aren’t talked about, that inform the whole tenor of family life? Especially at a point in our history when people very deliberately wanted to put the War behind them and concentrate on rebuilding their lives in peacetime.
 
I should probably also confess that at this stage I wasn’t quite ready to let go of the Meadows family. I’d become enormously fond of them, perhaps especially of William. It wasn’t that I wanted to write a sequel – and the new book most definitely isn’t one – but a companion novel? Why not?
 
So my starting point was the desire to find out more about William’s father. To try and understand him, and see how his personality and his behaviour had shaped the lives of future generations. Of course, for this to become a whole book, I needed a lot more ideas besides. The story unfolds through three central characters: Edward (William’s father), his daughter Hope (one of William’s older sisters), and her daughter Nell (William’s niece). So each character needed creating, and the threads of the three stories needed weaving together into one narrative. And that’s when the fun really begins…

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A curious coincidence

5/1/2019

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I really enjoyed doing the research for this novel. Because Edward served as a chaplain during the Second World War, one of my first visits was to the Museum of Army Chaplaincy in Hampshire. The curator, Dr David Blake, very kindly showed me round and showed me all sorts of interesting artefacts.
 
As well as answering any number of questions, both on the day and then afterwards by email, David made some very helpful introductions to others who were researching the story of army chaplains in the Second World War.  One of these was a woman called Jenni Crane who bought a suitcase in a junkshop – and then discovered it had belonged to one Padre George Parry, who was killed on D-day. And she put me in touch with Frank Treble, whose father Harry had left an unpublished memoir about his D-day experience. All fascinating.
 
Anyway, in the course of our conversation, David mentioned that a number of padres were sent for highly secret battle training in Northamptonshire just before D-Day. On asking for the location, I discovered to my surprise that it was a little village called Church Stowe, barely six miles up the road from where I lived at the time.
 
It was tough training, too, using live ammunition. Believe it or not, some of it is still lying in the surrounding fields, all these years later. While I was talking to David I remembered an incident that took place only a few weeks before our conversation. My husband and I were driving down the A5, past the turn-off to Church Stowe, when were stopped by police. They told us that they had closed the road while an Army bomb disposal unit removed a stray piece of unexploded ordinance.
 
This picture comes from inside the church, sadly usually locked these days, where the men have gathered around the tomb of a knight. For inspiration, presumably.
 
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Inspired by the past Part 2

4/18/2019

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Oh dear… ‘Archie’ looks pretty forbidding in this photo. Another family member: in this case, Father Harold Adams, my great-grandfather on the other side of my family. He was the father of the woman Bobby married.
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Have you ever been asked to introduce yourself in a group, coming up with a ‘fun fact’ about yourself that will be easy for others to remember? When that happens to me I enjoy telling the story of Father Harold. You can probably tell from the picture that he was an Anglo-Catholic clergyman. In truth, he was so far ‘up the candle’, as they say, that he called all five of his children ‘Mary’ in honour of the mother of our Lord. Including his son. (I also have a precious photograph of the five Marys, with their mother. All six look remarkably serene in the circumstances.)
 
Beyond that, I don’t know much about Father Harold. But his picture is inspiration for Father Archie, who features in The Restless Wave.  Archie is the vicar under whose tutelage Edward serves his curacy in Oxford. He’s hard-working, faithful to his calling and passionately committed to serving the poor of his parish.
 
I suspect Archie, like Harold, could be pretty forbidding at times. Edward is certainly a little in awe of him. But I’m just as sure that his austere exterior masks a heart of gold.
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