There's just a week to go for our double signing and there's double the questions too.
Tony
There is
copious detail about the town of Chipping Norton of the period. How was this
researched?
Christopher
I’ve lived in Chipping Norton for a few years, and the
house in which I live is Jacob’s house – even if it’s larger in fiction than I
could manage in reality – so I know its moods, I know the setting. In terms of
the historical detail, I did plenty of reading on the internet, visited the
local museum, spoke to neighbours, referred to books of old photos, went for
walks around town.
Tony
The characters
in the book, particularly the country characters, are very clearly defined.
Were they based on real people?
Christopher
As mentioned before, Jacob’s experiences are to a
significant degree based on Jackie’s, so in that sense there must be
similarities between them – but I never met Jackie, of course, so I can’t say
to what degree their characters overlap. The Norman character is very much
based on my grandfather and shares many of his character traits and life
experiences – a simple, good man, strong as an ox, strapped to a plough in a
brown-clod northern field when nine years old, a farm-worker from that day on,
a victim of bastard taunts and injustice, losing his father under the wheels of
a bus and losing his inheritance as a result, a contract on a farm for 364
working days a year, dawn till dusk, Christmas day the only holiday. The real
Norman loved his animals too, but never left the north, working in his native
County Durham and neighbouring Northumberland until he retired. Incidentally,
the real Norman loved coming to Chipping Norton, even though he never lived
here. In real life, Jackie looked up to Norman – just as Jacob looks up to Norman
in the book – and hoped when he was a boy that he would grow up to be just like
him, but concluded during his time in Bomber Command that there was not much
chance of that happening any more (it is unclear from his letter whether he
said this because he felt that Bomber Command and the war had changed him to
the point that he could no longer be like Norman, or simply because he did not
expect to live long enough to grow to be like him). In
another letter, when writing about a girl he loved, Jackie compares her to
Norman, says she ‘has his ways and his kindness’ and that this has a lot to do
with ‘the way I love her so’. In the book I have mirrored this
relationship, and have added the fictional Norman, when putting the young Jacob
to bed at night, wishing that he too could have been a boy just like Jacob –
loved by his family – when he was growing up. So while
the central love story in Lost in the Flames is between Jacob and Rose, there
is another one too, between Jacob and Norman, the man Jacob loves ‘like a
father or a brother or something in between’.
All the other characters are fictional, though many of
them must share an amalgamation of the characteristics of people I’ve known in
real life.
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