Rose knew Krystof would speak to her again one day; she knew he’d let her know, somehow.

In her hands were his letters to her: unread, unknown, unearthed forty-six years after she had last seen his face…

 Between the lines

Discover the inspiration behind The Land Girl’s Letters

The birth of a novel

While you’re writing your first novel, you have the one thing published authors crave: the luxury of time. It’s as if you’ve had the whole of your life leading up to that magical moment when you type ‘the end’. Inspiration ebbs and flows at its own pace; you pick and choose your ideas, dreaming up plotlines. All the while, honing your craft.

Before my first novel The Land Girl’s Letters was published in 2008 (as A Season of Leaves/The Secret Letters) I went through a steep learning curve. Ever since I can remember, I’ve had a compulsion to write. In my teens I produced all sorts of stories, from gothic romance to bodice rippers – and all of them bound for the shredder. As time went on, I finished two ‘proper, grown-up’ contemporary novels. The first of which, via my agent, was rejected by publishers, while the second one was not even good enough for my agent to send off. I was scrabbling around; I needed a great story to tell. I didn’t realise that it had been there all along, right under my nose. 

I remembered my mother telling me about what happened to Great-Auntie Ginge. In her nineties, with her hair still a delicate shade of red, Ginge lived quietly in her non-descript bungalow, but had had an adventure that came straight out of a novel. During the Second World War, working as a land girl, Ginge met and married a Czech soldier, Jan. She followed him to Prague once peace was declared but they had to escape when the Communists took over. As a young woman, she experienced dangerous times and saw devastating things, and then simply got on with her life.

I went to visit her to find out more. Ginge’s sons said that she never opened up to them, that she was stoic and didn’t like to make a fuss, a trait of her generation. But I approached her as a journalist (my ‘proper job’) and kept a professional distance. She told me what happened, and The Land Girl’s Letters was born.

Although my novel is based on the events in Ginge’s amazing life, to create a better story arc, I racked up the tension and embroidered the truth by inventing Will Bowman, the menacing fiancé for my heroine Rose Pepper.

The writing of The Land Girl’s Letters was a long journey and it all began with the telling of a family story. It took me many years to get there.

In the autumn of 2007, I told the incredibly frail auntie Ginge that my novel, inspired by her own life, was to be published. A few weeks later she passed away. The timing was poignant and tinged with sadness; stranger than fiction.