Antiques Roadtrip at Green Knowe

You will have to be very quick but a charming couple came in today, to tell me that they had enjoyed a visit to 'Green Knowe', otherwise known as The Manor at Hemingford Grey.
This was home to one of my favourite children's authors, Lucy M. Boston.
Well, to get to the point, they told me that this wonderful old property had featured on an episode of Antiques Road Trip recently.
This episode can be found on the site below but for less than 24 hours!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01jznd3/Antiques_Road_Trip_Series_3_Reversions_Episode_7/

Lost in the Flames Q9 & 10

Tony

The love story is a very unusual one, both because of the reversal of the usual ages, because there was such a large gap, and because Rose was aware of her feelings at such a young age. What made you construct it so?

Christopher

I never really thought of it as particularly unusual. Aren’t all love stories unusual, each one different from the next, an area of life where fact is stranger than fiction, or should be? Anything less, and perhaps it’s not a love story at all? But yes, I guess the love story between Jacob and Rose is not in the conventional style of ‘boy meets girl’ or ‘older man meets younger woman’, even more so given that it’s set in the 1930s and 40s. But Rose is a free spirit and follows her heart – she is human, after all, even if it is the 30s and 40s – and her heart is with Jacob. She doesn’t necessarily know what her feelings for him are when she’s young, but she knows that the feelings are there, and once Jacob is old enough to realise it too, the rest is inevitable. Star-crossed lovers, destined to be together, destined to be apart too.

Tony

Now that this book is behind you, do you already have plans for another? If so, what and when?

Christopher

As mentioned above, I’ve already got another finished manuscript that I wrote before Lost in the Flames. The Art of Waiting is another love story set before, during, and after the Second World War – this time in Venice and Russia. Whether or not it ever sees the light of day will depend on how things go with Lost in the Flames.

Thanks Christopher, for your time in answering all those questions and the best of success for your book..

Tomorrow, on the blog, it will be the turn of Derek J Taylor to answer some questions about his book A Horse in the Bathroom.

Lost in the Flames Q7 & 8

Tony

From the outset, there is a recurrent theme of fire. The brothers consumed by it, the fires in crashing planes, and the blazing cities, even the constant reference to smoking. Was this deliberate and planned?

Christopher

The story – and I guess the story of Bomber Command – is all about people and things getting burnt away to nothing, literally and metaphorically, so the prevalence of fire in the story isn’t surprising. The cigarette theme started, as far as I can remember, from the idea of Jackie’s (and therefore Jacob’s) cigarette stub, the last piece of him that is left. And in reality the cigarette was, by all accounts, a pretty constant presence for many of the bombers, a means of coping – perhaps also for those they left behind when they were gone.

Tony

Apart from the theme of fire, what other key themes are there in the book?

Christopher

An element of contradiction is central to the book, and – I think – to the story of Bomber Command. How a wrong can sometimes be a right. And the ambiguous nature of freedom and entrapment, how what traps you can be the thing that sets you free, how we shape our prisons to our needs – Jacob trapped in the bombed-up belly of his whale, unable to escape from the life he is living, but freed by it too, fulfilling his dream of flying, something he probably could never have achieved if the war had not intervened. And the fact that what traps you can also set you free means that Jacob’s pigeons return to their cage when they are let out, the canary in its cage at Kings Cross station sits content there when it could fly through the open door and into the sky, a trilling speck of yellow, and Jacob is drawn back to ‘bomber land’ again when he is finally free to leave. Strength and beauty in adversity would be another theme – in Jacob’s poem to Rose, the moon represents love, a love unseen in daylight, unseen until the darkness sets her free, the notion of the best of people coming out in adversity, the darkness releasing light, another contradiction. And the theme of temporariness making things more, not less, valuable – a temporariness that for a Bomber Command airman enriched life to an exaggerated degree because tomorrow he might well not be around to enjoy and appreciate the precious things. So Jacob had it all, an enhanced richness to his life, true companionship and love, but too little time to live it all in. That this effect was played out on so many thousands of airmen, and at such a young age, and the fact that they have been maligned ever since, is at the heart of the tragedy of Bomber Command.  

The other book

Don't forget, we have another author coming next Saturday too.


Derek J. Taylor will be here signing his very popular paperback,
A Horse in the Bathroom.

Reviews for this and for Lost in the Flames are now on the blog.

Just click on the Reviews link on the right.

Lost in the Flames Q5 & Q6

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.

Lost in the Flames Q5

Tony

I believe you write in your spare time. The research is obviously a great part of a book of this kind but how long did the book take to write?

Christopher

I started it on 2nd January 2010 and finished the first draft three months later. But that was just the start, of course – leave it to sit for a while, rewrite it, get feedback, have a think, leave it be, rewrite it, leave it again, more rewrites – and I finished it in January this year. So two years altogether. But I guess it took longer than that really, as I spent years, off and on, reading and thinking about the subject until I felt I knew enough to try to write about it. In terms of hours, I probably write at about 300 words per hour. But that’s just the first draft, and the first draft is never good enough, so by the end it probably works out at around 300 finished words in 5 hours, and there are around 90,000 words in the book, so I guess that’s around – gets out his calculator – 1,500 hours total. An average of two hours a day over two years – that sounds about right.

Lost in the Flames Q 4

Tony

Were you always planning to write? And was it always going to be this book?

Christopher

This is actually my second manuscript – the first is called The Art of Waiting (appropriately named, as it’s still waiting). After I’d read a lot about Bomber Command, and the last airworthy Lancaster in England had flown over my house on several occasions and I’d got to know the sound of its engines, and I’d heard more anecdotes about Jackie from my grandmother – and had read A.C. Grayling’s Among the Dead Cities, in which he compares the Bomber Command airmen to the 9/11 bombers – I knew I wanted to write a book about Bomber Command. I’m not a historian, so it had to be a novel – though the first draft of the book was trying unsuccessfully (and unintentionally) to be both a novel and a history book. And I had this naïve notion that a novel might be read by people with no interest in Bomber Command, and that if they read it, they might understand why the public perception of the Bomber Command airmen has been lazy and unfair, and that I might somehow help to set the record straight. I spent the Christmas holidays in 2009 in front of the fire, drinking Hook Norton beer and listening to Magic FM, and from that I got the basic shape and sentiment of what I wanted to try to put into words. Then it was a case of trying to get that sentiment out, and I did it in a rush, long nights and weekends (and more beer and love songs) until it was done. In part it’s a tribute to Jackie and the other 55,572 who died while flying with Bomber Command, and in part it’s an attempt to try to understand for myself what he went through, to understand it by trying to re-imagine it.