Refuse To Forget
In Refuse to Forget, I wanted to show the wild enthusiasm in 1914 to be involved in a war that started over issues irrelevant to most British people; also the determination of women not to be side-lined in this as they were in most other things and the unanticipated costs, even among those who survived. The story derives from actual events at the start of WW1: having been told to ‘go home and sit still’, Lady Millicent Sutherland (among others) took her own private ambulance to Belgium in September 1914 to ‘do her bit’, though her adventure ended rather more prosaically than Lady Hester’s in the novel.
Tell us about how your Great Uncle aroused your interest in the war.
By the curiosity he aroused in an impressionable child. He died when I was nine and I doubt if I spoke to him, but he was talked of in hushed tones of someone who’d won the Military Cross but never really settled thereafter. While evidence of WW2 was all around in the 50s and 60s, and being replayed in films and on TV, this ‘Great’ war, as people referred to it, almost seemed forgotten so the mystery planted a seed.
Tell us about your previous novel Love, Freedom or Death.
Very different in many ways from Refuse to Forget, since it’s a love story about a New Zealander with the Cretan resistance in WW2, it does, however, share some similarities: again inspired by an actual person, it’s about outsiders doing their own thing, wanting to make their mark and falling foul of both sides. Its genesis, however, contrasts with the present novel’s in that, having been many times to Crete, I wanted to give something back by writing a novel which might arouse the interest of others and stimulate them to visit, thereby helping Cretan friends moaning about the decline in tourism!
What can you tell us about the character of Harry in Refuse to Forget?
Harry came late to the story as it was originally envisaged as a film, but the novel required a point of view and I didn’t feel telling it via a forty-five year-old woman was appropriate for me. As a 14 year-old boy and a servant Harry sees, hears and relates things he doesn’t fully understand, so he takes in his stride events an adult might balk at. Having to hide his true age and hold back his opinions, he’s also in a state of turmoil a lot of the time: he therefore enables the reader to share the mixture of emotions the war aroused in people then. In addition to being this naive narrator he’s also the catalyst for the adventure in Belgium with the ambulance and comes to feel that his lie was responsible for Lady Hester’s later troubles. The consequences weigh heavily on him as they did on many of his contemporaries.
How did you find writing from the viewpoint of a 14 year-old boy?
Quite easy, thanks to arrested development! Certainly easier than from the perspective of a middle-aged Edwardian upper-class woman. Since Harry is actually relating the story when he’s older, there is anyway an element of cheating to it: his vocabulary isn’t that of a 14 year-old farm labourer with an elementary education. However, life was simpler then and the transition into adult life both more direct and more blurred than now, hence Harry’s belief that he’s grown up because he’s doing men’s work isn’t arrogant, although emotionally he’s still a child. I was concerned that fourteen could seem an incredible age to be involved until, after the book had gone to press, I read Richard van Emden’s Boy Soldiers of the Great War: in all some 250,000 under- age lads served in the British Army during the War, the youngest aged 13. If you looked old enough, you often were, especially while recruiting sergeants were paid a shilling for each one they signed up!
What was the research process like when writing your books?
I had previously visited the locations for episodes in the books, though they are to an extent re-imagined for the needs of the narrative, and read extensively about the conflicts. The final stage was a reading of contemporary literature to get both a feel for the time and pick out specific incidents, details and expressions that can be used. Much focussed on Edwardian England. The title, for instance, comes from Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, her account of her life before, during and after the War.
What is next for you?
Possibly something lighter! My first novel, The Chinese Attack, also had a WW1 context, that of the Chinese Labour Corps’ involvement on the Western Front from 1917, and having rather stumbled into the war genre I don’t think there’s another aspect I want to focus on. The First World War spawned a huge amount of fiction in the following decades, much of it since neglected, and the re-discovery of some of that deserves priority.
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