We are
delighted to welcome Maureen Stenning writing as Merryn Allingham.
Merryn
Allingham grew up reading Georgette Heyer so when she first put pen to paper,
or fingers to keyboard, she gravitated towards the Regency period. Over the
last few years, she has published six Regency romances under the name of Isabelle
Goddard, but now has a new writing name and a new genre. Her suspense trilogy, Daisy’s
War, is set in India and wartime London during the 1930s and 1940s. The
first in the series, The Girl from Cobb
Street, is published on 29th January, 2015.
Historical Research – Starting from the
Personal
Research
has always been the part I most enjoy in writing historical fiction. I usually
have a comfortable ‘nest’ on which I can build, and it’s only the smaller
details that I need to discover - what kind of butter churns were in use in the
Regency, for instance, or whether madeleines were eaten at the time. But when I
came to write The
Girl from Cobb Street, my nest was bare. It consisted of one very
old marriage certificate and a single visit I’d made to Rajasthan.
The
certificate recorded my parents’ wedding. My mother travelled to India in April
1937 and was married in St John’s Afghan Church, in what was then Bombay. Even
now India hits you in the face with its difference. But in the 1930s the
journey took three weeks and most people rarely ventured far beyond their home.
I tried to imagine how it must have been for a working class girl, who had
never been further from London than a day at the Southend seaside, to travel to
such an alien world and marry a man she hadn’t seen for six years. Out of that
imagining came my heroine, Daisy Driscoll. Daisy is reunited with her lover far more quickly, but she
faces many of the same hazards in settling to her new life in India.
Memories
of my Indian trip and the countless photographs I took gave me the setting –
the look, the smell, the colour and texture of the region. But I had no idea what
it must have felt like to live in 1930s British India. My mother had rarely
spoken of it. I guess she’d filed India away as a past that was no longer
relevant. We were an army family, constantly on the move, and there was always
another place to get used to – Egypt, Germany, Cyprus. All I knew was that she
hated the curry, was terrified of frogs in the bath and loved the cool beauty
of the hill station. And that her social life as a sergeant’s wife had been
great fun. By the end of the Second World War, though, my father had climbed the
ranks to become a captain and she was forced to become a part of the Officers’ Mess,
with all its subtle discriminations. Her reaction to this very different social
world was stark. She never felt she belonged and every mess ‘do’ was an
enormous trial for her.
It was into
this milieu that I plunged an ill-prepared Daisy. Her husband is a very junior
officer but still part of a world in which hierarchy and status are all
important, and where iron backed memsahibs rule. I spent weeks reading first-hand
accounts of life in the Raj: a huge
amount of fascinating material most of which, readers will be relieved, plays
only a minor role in the trilogy. Army
life, at least in India, was narrow and insular, the main topics of interest being
sport and gossip. Intellectual discussion was largely absent. The occasional
Gilbert and Sullivan musical evening was about as cultural as it got. Some of
the women were highly intelligent but had to pretend they weren’t, and I felt genuine
sympathy for them. Admiration, too, for their fortitude in making a home often
miles out in the bush, coping with the intense heat and the disease, bearing
children and seeing them die.
Their
attitudes to the colonised, however, though orthodox for the time, made me
cringe and I couldn’t let Daisy share them. So I read on – trying to get a
handle on the political situation in the late Thirties, when Europe was
threatened by war and Indian nationalism sensed an opportunity to throw off the
yoke of empire. Daisy’s
sympathies were clearly going to lie in this camp, so for all kinds of reasons
she was never going to fit the world into which she’d married. Add a deceitful
and desperate husband, and you have the seeds of disaster. In comparison, my
mother’s marriage was blissfully uneventful!
Links:
Website: www.merrynallingham.com
Facebook author page:
http://tinyurl.com/m322ovu
Amazon UK: http://tinyurl.com/onttjse
Amazon US: http://tinyurl.com/nveaou2
Pinterest: http://tinyurl.com/qh594av
What an interesting nugget of history, Maureen. Thank you and good luck with The Girl from Cobb Street
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