Research And Its Importance In Writing An Italian Affair

If you were to ask a totally sane individual why they would give up their day job as a moderately successful interior designer, to spend two years alone in their study getting down a story that would most likely never see the light of day ––the odds of gaining success are actually one in one hundred thousand, ––I think they may find it hard to give you an answer. But this is exactly what I did, and as luck may have it, to my eternal relief, I ended up with an amazing agent and publisher. But as to success, who knows, it is very early days.

Knowing all this I still took that big leap, so perhaps I ought to explain why. It’s very simple really, I love writing, and immersing myself in the stories and characters I create. Fortunately I also love the research. It has taken me to places I have never been and has given me the privilege of meeting the most fascinating people.

For me research is everything, it makes your story live. Authenticity is the key. When I started to write ‘An Italian Affair,’ I was slightly overwhelmed by the amount of reading that was needed. I was embarking on a period that I knew little about, set in two countries, one of them not my own. The story takes you from England to Italy in the 2nd World War and is about a family divided by war. The recently bereaved Alessandra Marston faces an impossible decision.

Should she accept an unexpected legacy and move to Italy with her daughter and live under a Fascist regime in an unsettled Europe in 1937, or should she turn down her inheritance and remain in England with her son Robert?

Finally, persuaded by him, she embarks with her daughter Diana on the adventure of a lifetime. Meanwhile Robert joins the RAF and becomes a Spitfire pilot, putting his life in danger every moment of the day. In 1943 he is recruited by the Special Operations Executive to train the growing Italian resistance movement. It is the story of a family’s lives and losses, their loves and their tragedies.

But to make it breathe, I needed to know about the life of a spitfire pilot, but I also needed to know about the ordinary Italian farmers whose lives were rocked by a war they neither wanted or cared about, but who helped many escaping British prisoners of war with never a thought for their own safety.

For Robert’s story I needed to enlist the help of people who had lived through these turbulent times. Sadly after seventy-five years, nearly all of those brave young men involved in the Battle of Britain have died, but I was so fortunate in finding two incredible nonagenarians who were happy to share their Air Force memories with me. I sat with them once a fortnight, had my manuscript corrected and was sent away with more books to read. The challenge was not just to do justice to these men and women but to weave together fact and fiction and create a compelling story.

Gerry Tyack, the owner of Wellington Aviation, a fascinating museum in Moreton in Marsh had been an engineer in Bomber Command. His great RAF friend, Group Captain Iain Panton, had flown every conceivable plane including Spitfires then early jet fighters. They taught me everything. What a privilege to have been taken under the wing of   these two wonderful men.

For the Italian story I was lucky enough to own a house deep in the heart of Italian countryside, surrounded by hilltop villages and castles. My friends and neighbours were more than happy to impart their intimate memories, invariably over a considerable quantity of wine. To my fascination I learnt that my woods had become a hiding place for escaping prisoners of war as well as Italians avoiding being sent to the munitions’ factories or the Russian front. Giovanni, an elderly gentleman living on a farm below my house, was actually a small boy at the time, and was able to tell me first hand. What an incredible experience, though an occasional challenge when my basic Italian failed me!

I searched the Tuscan countryside visiting towns and villages, searching out memorials telling the devastating consequence of war.

I researched the clothes, the food or lack of it. I needed to imagine my characters, not as twenty first century individuals but from their own time.

In my new novel, my heroine is training to be a heart surgeon in 1950s Paris, so my research moved to France. Last weekend I was in the exquisite library of Ecole de Medecine, taking photographs of old medical books while students worked around me. Admittedly I will never forget the day for another reason, the 15.4. 2019 was the day the Notre Dame burned.

I stayed with the most enchanting French woman who having read the first draft, took me to the places I had written about. It seems people open up their doors and their hearts to help.

In England I met a ninety-six-year old retired heart surgeon. He had been working and operating at a time when boundaries were being broken and lives were being lost and saved. From David I learnt everything. His mind is as sharp as a razor and he remembers every success and every failure. Again he checked my work, encouraged me to read and indeed learn about medicine in the 1950s when the first heart lung machine came into being, and other great strides were made in the field. I am now happy that my heroine Sophie follows the correct procedures for the time.

I went to Burgundy last summer with my husband. We stayed in a wonderful house in the wine country that became Sebastian, my hero’s family home. We moved onto to Chamonix to walk the meadows and mountain trails. Though I did not attempt Sebastian’s actual climb, there were moments on a tiny path at very high altitude when my sense of humour failed me.

This novel is now in the final editing phase and I already have ideas for the next. I am now looking forward to researching a different place and time.

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An Italian Affair by Caroline Montague is out now (published by Orion, £7.99)

Caroline won her first National Poetry competition at 10 years old and from that moment dreamed of being a writer. After juggling motherhood with modelling assignments, she founded an Interior Design Company working on many projects in the UK and abroad. Her second marriage to the widowed Conroy Harrowby brought four stepchildren into her life, giving her a wider audience for her imaginative bedtime stories. As a family they all live at the Harrowby ancestral home, Burnt Norton, which famously inspired T S Eliot to write the first of his “Four Quartets”. 

Follow Caroline on Twitter @CMontagueAuthor

AN ITALIAN AFFAIR

Love. War. Family. Betrayal.

Italy, 1937. Alessandra Durante is grieving the loss of her husband when she discovers she has inherited her ancestral family seat, Villa Durante, deep in the Tuscan Hills. Longing for a new start, she moves from her home in London to Italy with her daughter Diana and sets about rebuilding her life.

Under the threat of war, Alessandra’s house becomes first a home and then a shelter to all those who need it. Then Davide, a young man who is hiding the truth about who he is, arrives, and Diana starts to find her heart going where her head knows it must not.

Back home in Britain as war breaks out, Alessandra’s son Robert, signs up to be a pilot, determined to play his part in freeing Italy from the grip of Fascism. His bravery marks him out as an asset to the Allies, and soon he is being sent deep undercover and further into danger than ever before.

As war rages, the Durante family will love and lose, but will they survive the war…?

 

 

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