How a Teenage Fantasy Became a Wartime Novel

As a steamy adolescent growing up in rural Herefordshire, I was gripped by the story of Franz von Werra, the only German POW to escape from British captivity during the Second World War. My fascination with the story had great deal to do with the German actor who played von Werra in the film The One That Got Away, the rather gorgeous Hardy Krüger. I satisfied my teenage yearnings by writing a story about a lonely young woman finding an injured German pilot on her farm and deciding to help him. The story only went as far as the first kiss ‘as a watery sun broke through the clouds above.’

I left Hereford for London, working as a graphic designer. In my free time, I periodically returned to writing. Every few years I’d complete a novel and submit it to a small selection of publishers and agents. The rejections wounded and dispirited me sufficiently for me to abandon my dream of ever getting a book published. The following decade I would start the whole process again.

When I reached my fifth decade, I realised I could no longer indulge in this ten-year cycle. If I was going to get published, I had to keep going, however painful the rejections. I had maturity on my side. I knew that if a novel kept getting rejected, I had to write another one.

I was now living in a small Downland village in Oxfordshire and working a series of cosy mystery stories set in a rundown stately home in England. On my regular dog walk, I got chatting to friend in the local history society. During the course of this conversation, he mentioned that a German plane had crashed on the Downs above the village in November 1940 and immediately I felt that nascent story from my teenage years flood my imagination again.

I laid my latest cosy novel aside and began to work feverishly on A Dangerous Act of Kindness. I walked across the Downs above the village where the countryside is remote and inaccessible, past isolated farm buildings that are completely cut off during bad weather. Here was the ideal landscape to set my story.

As I researched, I discovered fascinating aspects of the Second World War that drove the narrative even deeper. By the end of hostilities, a quarter of the workforce on the land was prisoners of war. Despite news of the atrocities committed in the East, the English farmers preferred to have Germans working for them – they were efficient, dedicated and polite. English families invited them into their homes. One of the women in our village married a German POW at the end of the war. This charming old lady still lives here. She told me that neither she nor her husband ever experienced an unkindness or received an anti-German slur.

No peace treaty was ever signed at the end of the Second World War. Nonetheless, enemies were reconciled and a constructive relationship between the British people and Germany developed in a remarkably short space of time. I wanted to highlight this person-to-person peace and show in my novel that individual acts of kindness can change opinions more powerfully than years of war or indeed politics. A Dangerous Act of Kindness is a story of the redemptive power of love but it also tells a far bigger story of the humanity of enemy soldiers, the horrors of war and the psychology of collaboration.

Last year I submitted the story to the Caledonian Novel Award. Just before the results of the award were announced last February, I was contacted by Giles Milburn of Madeleine Milburn Literary, TV and Film Agency and offered representation. Within a few months, Giles had placed the book with Canelo Publishing and it will be out on 28 March 2019. I am now working on a second novel for Canelo for publication in March 2020, as well as completing the cosy mystery story that I set aside.

The dreams of my younger self have come true. I may not have found my attractive German pilot in a barn on my farm, but I have satisfied decades of writing and hoping. Finally, I am a published author.

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips