Alex Martin spinning Katherine Wheels

I am continuing my cunning plan to interview other authors (i.e. let them do the work), with an interview with Alex Martin, author of the Katherine Wheel Trilogy and other works.

 

Romance, history, adventure and suspense unite in Alex’s Katherine Wheel trilogy: Daffodils, Peace Lily and Speedwell.

  

 The story begins in Edwardian England, with feisty Katy Beagle working as a maid at Cheadle Manor and follows her marriage to gardener Jem Phipps, her rebarbative dealings with Lady Amelia Smythe at the big house, and her long friendship with Cassandra, daughter and eventually heir of the manor. As domestic crises, catastrophes and dramas are played out, the setting moves from rural Wiltshire, through the horrors of wartime France, post-war America, the early years of motor racing, and back to the manor. The stories see Katy fight her way from domestic skivvy to ambitious motor mechanic and successful business woman, while the fortunes of the feudal manor slip into obscurity.

Here is my interview with Alex

Question: The Katherine Wheel books are a huge undertaking, covering such an action-packed period and must have involved a huge amount of research. How did you go about it? Did you start with months or years of in-depth research, or plunge in and research it as you went along?

I wrote Daffodils over a period of ten years. I wasn't writing every day, of course, and it was the daunting mountain of research that kept stalling me. I never set out to tackle WW1 but was interested in how plumbing had gradually arrived in our little village in Wiltshire and in learning about that I, just like the characters in the book, got drawn into that global conflict - very unwillingly. Plumbing, I hear you say? Yes, we had a very old neighbour - he was nearly 100 years when he died and he'd lived in our humble string of tiny cottages since he was 4. I dubbed it Skid Row. He could remember when the only drinking water came from the village pump on the green, which features in Daffodils, as Katy has to carry it to her house in buckets all the time. He was a wonderful raconteur and told me with great relish and much embellishment how the six cottages had first one tap to serve them all, then one between them until the great day dawned when they had actual sinks with taps installed inside their old walls. And that's how The Katherine Wheel Series began. Now I have a shelf groaning with books on WW1, much of which made for sobering reading. I was shocked at what I discovered, especially the brutality and stupidity of how the British Army treated their gullible cannon-fodder, which I have woven into the story.

Question: Katy Phipps is such an unusual heroine. Not many heroines spend their days in greasy overalls, wielding wrenches. I like her immensely. Do you?

Not at first. I was in agreement with the village chorus, voiced by the likes of Martha Threadwell, the village Post Mistress and her acolyte Mrs Hoskins, housekeeper to the sly vicar. We all thought Katy a flighty, shallow flirt, and so she was. The whole Katherine Wheel Series is a study of how a young, naive, ambitious girl becomes a resourceful, compassionate and successful woman in her own right and how her character deepens and develops through her ordeals. I didn't think the world needed another book about angelic nurses, either, and as I researched the era, I was struck by the vanguard of valiant women who stepped up and swept the streets, emptied dustbins and drove ambulances. During my research I found that only aristocratic young women were allowed into the FANY to drive ambulances, so Katy, with her working class roots, was assigned to the WAAC. There she learned the trade of car mechanic and it was perfect because it lead her nicely into setting up her own garage in Peace Lily, getting involved in the glamorous world of motor racing in the 'twenties in Speedwell and even coming up with an ingenious invention that changed her life.

Question:  As the stories progress, you settle into a fine balance between two couples, Katy and Jem, Cassandra and her American husband Doug, closely connected, yet living very different lives.

Did you find it difficult switching perspectives, or did it help to keep the inspiration flowing?

Thank you. No, it wasn't difficult. In the very early days of writing Daffodils, an agent took an interest and left me in no doubt that the upper classes could be just as fascinating as those they considered beneath them. I loved switching from Katy's life to Cassandra's apparently easier one and particularly making each impact upon the other. In Speedwell the consequences of their inter-relationship manifests with devastating effect.

Question: You obviously know Wiltshire very well. Is Cheadle Manor based on a real place?

Not the manor house, funnily enough, but the little row of cottages where Katy and Jem set up home is based upon the humble abode where my kids were born and the geography of the two villages is very much the same. Although I was born in greater London, I grew up in Wiltshire before moving to south Wales thirty years ago. I do know and love it well but I'm hooked on living by the sea now. Cheadle Manor itself is entirely a figment of my imagination, which is always useful because you can create a place entirely designed to your own satisfaction and to fit the plot.

Question: Have you ever been tempted to write a scene in which Lady Amelia Smythe is throttled? I know I would enjoy it.

Yes, she's a one, as they say. I adore writing about her and she's a useful plot twister too. I have sketched out a fourth and final book in The Katherine Wheel series, Woodbine and Ivy, and this will push the characters on twenty years, with their children becoming embroiled in the second World War, which defined their generation. Lady Amelia will be tapping on by then, so she might not survive the ordeal and I shall spare her nothing.

Question: Did you have the complete trilogy planned when you started, or were you just expecting to write the one book? Has the wheel finished turning or is there more to come?

Not at all! I decided to get serious about my lifelong ambition to write stories when they pushed the pension age to a distant speck on my horizon. I joined a website called www.youwriteon.com which is funded by the Arts Council and very clever. The idea is to post a piece of your work for it to be randomly critiqued by peer members, whose work you also criticise. Encouraged by all my stories reaching the top ten, and even the top five for The Rose Trail, friends I had made via the site encouraged me to self-publish The Twisted Vine. Then I thought I might as well finish up the plumbing idea set in Wiltshire by writing Daffodils and the whole thing just snowballed.

Question: You have a fourth book, The Twisted Vine, a thriller set among grape-pickers, and the vineyards of France are very convincingly drawn. Did you draw on your own experiences, when writing it?

Very much so. I, just like Roxanne in the book, was running away from a disastrous relationship to France, where I had a vague idea I might be able to get work picking grapes. I was just as green as her, though perhaps my French is a little better! I can vouch for the research about 'les vendanges', as the grape harvest is called, being utterly genuine. It's really hard work. You get up with the dawn, often picking grapes dusted with frost or, in the south, in the baking heat and work until sunset. Some farmers feed and house you well, others can be pretty grim. I learnt a lot and never regret the experience. I thought it would make a good backdrop to a mystery but I didn't personally experience the scene in the car with Armand; that was an anecdote from a friend who'd gone hitch-hiking around the same time. Even the episode in the convent was based on that real experience. However the rest of the plot is entirely fictitious. I particularly liked writing about Louis' bitterness, softened by his love of his native soil and Armand's twisted profile.

Question: What's next?

I have a lot of ideas to explore; just hope I have enough energy, discipline and time to finish them. However, the next book is written, It is currently with my editor, my son Tom, a scientist and writer and who is both brutal and professional in his role. It's called The Rose Trail and is a ghost story set in dual time, both modern and during the English Civil War. This has entailed researching another horrific war, one which divided families up and down the land and tore apart old loyalties in the name of religion. A fascinating period in our history. Again it is set in Wiltshire where a real battle, depicted in The Rose Trail, took place and creates a dramatic climax to the historical thread. I'm hoping this book will set up a series of paranormal tales with the two women, Persephone and Fay, going on to solve more creepy mysteries using their intuitive psychic powers.

Click on the hyperlinked titles of each book above or below. They are all on Amazon and in local bookstores around Gower, where I live. Here's the links again.

The Twisted Vine

Daffodils

Peace Lily

Speedwell

Blog: In The Plotting Shed.

Twitter

Linkedin:

Pinterest:

Amazon Author Page:

Goodreads:

 

Interview with Judith Barrow

I have decided, after a long period of hibernation, to restart my blog, concentrating on matters of writing, authorship and books. I am beginning with a interview with fellow Honno author, Judith Barrow. Judith grew up in Saddleworth, on the Pennines, but has lived in Pembrokeshire for more than 30 years.

 

Judith has written the Shadows trilogy, a wonderfully evocative trilogy, the life, loves and tribulations of Mary Howarth and her family.

The story begins, in World War II, with A Pattern Of Shadows. Against a domestic background of family strife, jealousies and dramas, Mary is working as a nurse at the Granville mill that is now serving as a prisoner of war camp for Germans. The one thing she should not do is fall for a German doctor, Peter Schormann, but she does. In the second book, Changing Patterns, with Mary and Peter living in Wales, she struggles to deal with the prejudices of the time and to sort out her relatives who remain in Lancashire. The war is over but strife and tragedy is not. In the third book, Living In The Shadows, the action jumps forward to 1969. A new generation and new dramas, but there’s no escaping the legacy of the past. It keeps catching up.

  

So here is my interview with Judith

Question: You have written a brilliant trilogy. Did you set out to write the full cycle, or did the first just tempt you into continuing?

Nothing was further from my mind when I was writing the first novel.

The idea for Pattern of Shadows sprang from an occasion when I was in Lancashire researching for a different book. I came across an article about an old cotton mill that was one of the first prisoner of war camps for German soldiers in World War Two.

What I read fascinated me. Not only because it was in Lancashire, near to the Pennines where I grew up but also because, as a child, I spent quite a lot of time in a cotton mill.

Now, before anyone thinks I’m older than I actually am, or that I was exploited as a child to labour in a textile mill, I should explain:

In the nineteen sixties my parents worked in the local cotton mill.

My mother was a winder (working on a machine that transferred the cotton off large cones onto small reels (bobbins), in order for the weavers to use to make the cloth). Well before the days of Health and Safety I would often go to wait for her to finish work on my way home from school. I remember the muffled boom of noise as I walked across the yard and the sudden clatter of so many different machines as I stepped through a small door cut into a great wooden door. I remember the rumble of the wheels as I watched men pushing great skips filled with cones alongside the winding frames, or manoeuvring trolleys carrying rolls of material. I remember the women singing and shouting above the noise, whistling for more bobbins: the colours of the cotton and cloth - so bright and intricate. But above all I remember the smell: of oil, grease - and in the storage area - the lovely smell of the new material stored in bales and the feel of the cloth against my legs when I sat on them, reading until the siren hooted, announcing the end of the shift.

When I thought about the POW camp I wondered what kind of signal would have been used to separate parts of the day for all those men imprisoned there. I realised how different their days must have been from my memories of a mill.

So I knew I had my setting. An industrial town with a POW camp on the outskirts of that town.

I knew what kind of story I wanted to write: I would write a love story, a life story, a family saga.

And I knew the type of family that I needed to live in that town, be involved in some way with the camp. They had to be as real to me as I hoped they would be to my future readers. (See how optimistic I was before I’d even started the book?!!) They had to be a set of diverse characters with interesting lives and one of them had to be the protagonist.

And I knew right away what the protagonist would be like: a young, strong, sometimes feisty woman, with a great strength of characters, loyal to family and friends, independent yet mindful of familial responsibilities. Finally I knew her name, Mary Howarth.

What I didn’t know was how much she and her family would come to mean so much to me.

And that, when I finished the first draft and the story was neatly tied up, I would be so lost. I didn’t want it to end there. I re-wrote it. And then re-wrote it again. In fact I re-wrote it six times. Until, in the end I realised that the family hadn’t finished with me; those characters wanted more of their story told.

So I wrote the sequel, Changing Patterns. Set in 1950/51 it is a continuation of their lives in the aftermath of the war, during the hardship of rationing, and shows how each copes with the result of their actions during the war.

It felt natural, then, to leap forward in time to reveal how the next generation of the Howarth family was affected by all that had gone before. So I wrote Living in the Shadows, set in 1969


Question: Your books are set in industrial Pennines and rural Wales, both areas that you know well, and that comes across strongly in the books. Do you find either one easier to evoke?

One of my favourite things when I’m writing is to evoke a sense of place through description. It only takes a few words or sentences here and there. You don’t need a great dollop of narrative to create a setting. I just close my eyes and picture what I want to see. Sometimes an image will come to me that I know I’ll need as a background for a particular scene, a certain part of the story. When that happens I write it and keep it in a separate file.

But in answer to your question, I have to say it was easier to evoke a town in the industrial Pennines because I grew up a few miles away from such a town in the sixties and, although at the time I was oblivious to the fact, that it wasn’t too long after the war. And I do remember a lot of the late sixties, which is the era of the last book of the trilogy.

Ashford, the fictional town in the book, is actually loosely based on Oldham. I say loosely but for one fact which I’ll tell you about later.

I was brought up in a village in the Pennines. I loved the hills and the moors so it was simple to picture the surrounding area; to describe how it was then. And every Saturday my mother and I would catch the bus to Oldham to go shopping and pay the bills. So going back in time to the days of the old-fashioned Woolworths, the market, the shops on the High Street was a brilliant reminiscence for me.

We moved to Pembrokeshire in the late seventies so I needed to combine the research of rural Wales during the war, immediately afterwards and in the sixties with how I’ve seen it since we’ve lived here. I love the coastline, the countryside, the farmland and the slower pace of life here in Wales. And I know that much of the natural areas haven’t changed too much. But I have to admit, putting together the two, the research and what I saw was a little more difficult. It took me a lot more time and a lot of effort before I was happy with the descriptions, the evocation of the little village of Llamroth

Question: The trilogy is a family saga, covering a period from World War II to the trendy 60s, and each period is conveyed very convincingly. How much research did you have to do?

Simply put… loads. I have thick files of the research I did for each book. Each folder contains a section on the society during each era: the politics and politicians’ names, the social attitudes, houses, furniture, domestic appliances (if any and, if not, what was used beside a sweeping brush, donkey stone and, on washing days, a dolly tub and mangle) clothes, food and recipes, the newspapers and magazines at the time (including children’s comics), toys, films, radio (or television) programmes, shops. Anything and everything to bring the world that the characters move around in to life.

I have to admit, though, I didn’t have to do quite as much research for Living in the Shadows; I was very aware of the life around me in 1969!


Question: A central presence in all three books is the Granville, an old cotton mill that serves as a prisoner of war camp. Is it based on a real place?

Ah, now. This is what I meant when I said the industrial town in the Pennines is loosely based on Oldham except for one fact. The Granville is based on reality. It is created from Glen Mill, the actual POW camp on the outskirts of Oldham.

Glen Mill was a disused cotton mill built in 1903 it ceased production in 1938. At a time when all-purpose built camps were being used by the armed forces and there was no money available for POW build, Glen Mill was chosen for various reasons: it wasn't near any military installations or seaports and it was far from the south and east of Britain, it was large and it was enclosed by a railway, a road and two mill reservoirs.

The earliest occupants were German merchant seamen caught in Allied ports at the outbreak of war and brought from the Interrogation centre of London. Within months Russian volunteers who had been captured fighting for the Germans in France were brought there as well. According to records they were badly behaved, ill disciplined and– oddly enough, I thought–hated the Germans more than they did the British. So there were lots of fights. But, when German paratroopers (a branch of the Luftwaffe) arrived they imposed a Nazi-type regime within the camp and controlled the Russians.

Later in the war the prisoners elected a Lagerführer; a camp leader. This hierarchy ruled the inner workings of the camp and the camp commanders had to deal with them.

The first ever talk I gave was to about a hundred and fifty people who, I was told just before the talk were, ‘Friends of Glen Mill… you’d better have done your research.’

I had. It went okay. But I’ve never known such sheer panic about a talk since.



Question: There’s a love story running through the books, but because it is a family saga rather than a simple romance, you follow a host of diverse characters. Do you enjoy playing with a large and complex cast, rather than concentrating solely on one protagonist?

I do! It’s like life; we’re all intermingled with one another in this world. We don’t live in a vacuum. As John Donne says” No Man is an Island.”

It’s fun, thinking about what one character will be doing while another takes over the plot, the story, for a while. A bit like characters on stage; they never stop acting.

As long as I remember that whatever the others in the cast do, ultimately it affects the protagonist (and/or the antagonist) in some way, I can keep an eye on everyone. Obviously it can go wrong in the first few drafts but, in the end, it works well.

Perhaps I just like making life difficult for myself.

But the way I write is to give separate chapters, different times, to the main characters’ point of view. I think it works. It’s important that the reader knows just who they are following, exactly whose perspective they are reading.


Question: Do you plan to add to the story, or do you think it’s now complete?

I thought the series would be over by the end of the trilogy. It’s not! My WIP is the prequel set between 1912 and 1924. Working title, Foreshadowing. And it tells the story of Winifred and Bill, Mary’s parents.


Question: Have you always wanted to be a writer, or did it creep up on you?

We were rather isolated as a family so I was a bit of a loner as a child. From being small, I wrote to invent characters that would fill my world and I’m embarrassed to admit I would act them out when I was on my own. I loved English in school and would write huge long stories that the poor teacher had to plough through. I had wonderful English teachers that always encouraged me. Depending what was happening in my life I either wrote a lot or hardly anything but I wrote every day. As an adult I began sending out short stories and poems with moderate success. The novels I wrote I hid away. It was only after I had breast cancer that I found courage to let the world see my books.

It was the best thing I did. But there is a tale to it. Perhaps it’s best I just share it here: http://bit.ly/1Usy8xI


Links to Judith's books, website, blog etc.

Pattern of Shadows http://amzn.to/1toWbaY

Changing Patterns http://amzn.to/1U1AzHM

Living in the Shadows http://amzn.to/1Uc0Ghp


Website: http://www.judithbarrow.com

Blog: https://judithbarrowblog.com/

Twitter: @barrow_judith

Facebooks: judith.barrow.3

Pinterest: judithbarrow

Goodreads: Judith_Barrow

Google+: JudithBarrowauthor

Linkedin: judith-anne-barrow-02812b11

about me: http://about.me/jbarrow