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| CJ Wray at the Peter Jones café where the action in the book began! |
1.Welcome Chris, and thank you for taking the time to do this interview for the Literary Sewing Circle! Can you tell us a bit about how you came to write The Excitements? What was the genesis of the story?
Hello! Thank you so much for inviting me to join the Literary Sewing Circle. I’m delighted to be able to tell you something about my book.
I’ve been writing for thirty years, starting out in my twenties with rom-coms under my own name, Chrissie Manby, which were really lightly-disguised retellings of my terrible dating life. As I headed towards my fifties, I realised I couldn’t write the same old ‘girl meets boy’ story anymore. While I was wondering what to do next, I was commissioned to ghostwrite the memoirs of British veterans Patricia and Jean Owtram, a pair of sisters in their late nineties, who both served in the women’s forces in WW2. That book became “Codebreaking Sisters: Our Secret War” (Mirror Books).
I enjoyed working with Pat and Jean so much. Their WW2 stories were fascinating. Pat was in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (known as the Wrens), while Jean was in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (known as the Fanny, which possibly sounds a little strange to Canadian ears). But what interested me even more was the women Pat and Jean became after the war. They both went on to have amazing careers. Pat was one of Britain’s first female television producers, making many of our best loved shows, and Jean helped to set up the University of Lancaster. They were both unusual in that they married late and didn’t to have children and, in their nineties, they were still very active, travelling and entertaining friends late into the evening. And, in Jean’s case, smoking roll-ups and riding horses.
I was swept up into Pat and Jean’s world and I loved it. The book we’d written together had concentrated on their younger years and I wanted to write something that reflected the women they’d become. Jean was always playfully hinting that she might have been involved in espionage. How could a novelist not run with a story like that? So, I created Penelope and Josephine Williamson, heroines of The Excitements, who lived the secret lives I imagined for Pat and Jean.
2. When you are writing a novel inspired by real lives, how do you balance fact and fiction? Is it an easy thing to do?
To use painting as a metaphor, finding inspiration in real lives gives me the colour palette to work with to make my picture authentic, but the composition has to come from my imagination. I’ve written novels blending fact and fiction before (I wrote a trilogy as Stella Knightley, which drew on historical figures in Renaissance Italy, 19th century Paris, and Weimar Berlin). I very much enjoy working that way. It’s not always easy but it’s definitely interesting!
3. I loved how the story moved between wartime and present day - it reveals so many of the secrets of these characters and makes us think about how people are not as simple as they might first appear (especially older women!). How much research did you do about wartime experiences? Or is that something you already knew a lot about?
While working on Pat and Jean’s memoir, I did extensive research into women’s services in WW2, and into their roles in particular, to give context to the diaries and letters they’d kept from that time. It was a steep learning curve. I knew hardly anything about WW2 beyond the Blitz. I had about three months to do a deep dive into two very different aspects of the war. Pat’s work involved tracking the German navy in the waters around the UK, while Jean’s work took her to Cairo and Italy.
For The Excitements, I also read everything I could lay my hands on about the SOE and the female agents who were dropped behind enemy lines. I am lucky to know a couple of real experts on WW2, historians, who gave me useful pointers. I will forever be grateful to my friend Dr David Jordan for pointing me in the direction of William E Fairbairn and his wartime guide to women’s self-defence, Hands Off! It gave me a real sense of the concerns and capabilities of young women in the 1930s and 1940s.
4. I enjoyed how you blended humour with intrigue, and created some lovely characters and relationships in this story. Is balancing humour with more heartfelt themes a difficult thing to do when you're writing?
I think even the most heartfelt novel needs humour. Life is never all bad and, in the UK in particular, we have a long history of leavening the darkest moments with a joke. In fact, I find it hard not to add humour to my writing. I hope I manage to balance humour with poignancy in The Excitements. I didn’t want to detract from the horror of war but, at the same time, having met many WW2 veterans over the past eight years, I know it would not have been realistic to paint them as overly serious. Humour got them through.
5. The imagery and descriptions in this story were such fun to read, particularly the descriptions of clothing over the decades. Do you have experience with sewing and textiles yourself? And if so, can you tell us about it?
I love fashion! In fact, as a teenager I wanted to be a fashion designer but I went to the kind of school where studying art was considered somewhat frivolous. We were very much encouraged to pursue subjects that would lead to a ‘proper’ career. But I always drew outfits as a child and found the forties silhouettes very inspiring. There’s a lot of the forties in eighties fashion, which is the era in which I grew up.
I have done some sewing over the years and I am writing this wearing a pair of floral shorts I’m particularly proud of. I also enjoy knitting and I have been trying to teach myself to weave on a fixed-heddle loom. My results still look very amateur but I love putting colours together. Colour and texture interests me as much as form. Can you tell I’m a frustrated designer???
6. Finally, there are so many threads woven in to this story for readers to explore. What do you hope readers will take away?
I hope readers will come away feeling entertained and uplifted but also inspired to look more deeply into the real stories of women in war. In these strange times, it can be helpful to learn how our grandmothers coped with the uncertainty, deprivation and terror of living through conflict. Many ordinary women did extraordinary things during WW2 and I like to think that we younger women could find the same mettle.
7. And if you wish to share, are you working on anything else that’s upcoming?
Since I wrote The Excitements and it’s follow-up, Bad Influence, I have collaborated on two non-fiction books. In The Shadow Of The Rising Sun by Olga Henderson (Mirror Books) is the story of her childhood as an internee in a Japanese prison camp in Singapore. War Babies (Mirror Books), which I wrote with social historian Simon Robinson, contains a series of interviews with British 80- and 90-somethings who were children during WW2. I very much enjoyed working on that book, which took me out into my local community to meet people who remembered the Blitz. Corroborating their stories with the records of where bombs fell in London made me look at my neighbourhood very differently. Basically, in London, if you see a modern house on a Victorian street, WW2 is the reason.
As for what’s next? From October, I’m going to be the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, helping students with their writing while I work on my own memoir. Watch this space! And thank you for having me!
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I hope you are all enjoying The Excitements! Please leave any thoughts or responses to this interview in the comments.
And, you can find out more about CJ Wray/Christine Manby and her many books at her website or via Instagram
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