Return to Fourwinds (45 page)

I wrote the two books in tandem over two writing courses that I did in Oxford and London, so the books do have some similarity in themes. But they are also very different stories. One is a love letter to Scotland and the Hebrides, and the other forms a sort of love letter to Englishness in all its variations and permutations. I wanted to examine and celebrate the uniqueness of both places. In
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to Fourwinds
I wanted to celebrate and hold the various time frames and English locations as being part of a whole, so that if you plotted all those points of experience with authentic detail, then you would come up with a sort of 3-D shape that might describe a portrait of English experience at a certain time span of history. And, of course, part of that experience is that people live abroad for a while, or move to England from other cultures.

4.  What character do you identify with most in the novel, and why?

I have to say that I identified with all the characters! One of the best things about writing, and reading other novels, is the chance to see the world through someone else's eyes for a while and experience a life you'll never live. So while I'm writing that character, I try and see through their eyes. I especially enjoy writing about characters in the past as it has the exciting element of time travel.

5.  
Return to Fourwinds
sweeps through locations and times. Did you travel to any of the destinations within the novel for your research?

I included places that I knew well, or knew from quite vivid family accounts, such as my father's experience of the Manchester blitz, or memories of my great grandmother in her tiny Devon cottage who had a broad country accent and called me ‘my little maid'. I wanted to take a close look at how people lived in an actual place and time so I needed locations where I could access a lot of detail. As a child we moved around to various parishes with my father's work and got to experience life as part of different communities, from a hard-up council estate to a well-heeled country village. Of course, the book ends in 1980 so it doesn't include experiences from the last three decades, but I hope it still carries a way of looking at a society that can hold lots of variations with equal respect, from the new to the
traditional – it's all part of the mix. And that vision of equal respect is as important in a country as it is in a family for everyone to thrive, and to keep the cohesiveness of a group that, at the end of the day, you hope will be there for you when you need them. I'd love the next generation to have enough of a vision of community to keep the NHS going, for example.

6.  Can you tell us a little bit about what you are working on next?

The next book is a true story about a remarkable man called Janusz Korczak, who cared for 200 children in the Warsaw Ghetto. He was famous in Poland for his books such as
How to Love a Child
and
The Child's Right to Respect
. His works are still quoted by the NSPCC and the UN. He believed that children needed to be studied individually and understood for who they were and the stage they were at, whether three or thirteen. He also advocated that adults should apply the same rules to themselves as they do to children, with mutual respect and no violence. He was a sort of Polish Lewis Caroll and a well-loved national figure. He was also Jewish. In August 1940, the Nazis swooped in on all of the ghetto orphanages in Warsaw and marched away 4,000 children to the trains for Treblinka in the space of a single day. Dr Korczak was offered the chance to escape but he refused to leave his children and died with them in Treblinka. The story focuses around Misha, one of the orphanage workers, and his wife Sophia. They were among the one percent to survive the Warsaw Ghetto and continued to teach and spread Korczak's ideals after the war.

Reading Group Questions

1.  What did you think were the central themes of the novel, and how did they resonate with you?

2.  The narrative takes us on a journey from Valencia and the English countryside to the post-war slums in the north. How does the author evoke a sense of place?

3.  ‘How easy it was to wreck a life, with a careless word…' Explore how both Ralph and Sarah feel compelled to keep the secret of their past in order to protect those that they love.

4.  Sarah abandons her fiancé Nicky and vanishes without a trace on the eve of their wedding. How did this affect your response to her as a character, and how does this change as the novel progresses?

5.  We often put our best face on for the world. With reference to Alice and Ralph, what might happen in a relationship when people do not feel able to be open and vulnerable with each other?

6.  All families were affected by the war years in the last century, and many people report a reluctance to talk about the experience of that painful time. Do you relate to this in your own family history?

7.  Has what people feel should or should not be kept secret within a family changed over the past century?

8.  Fourwinds itself becomes a character in this book. How important is the concept of home to the characters in the novel?

9.  Did anything surprise you during the course of reading this book? Did it alter any of the views you currently hold?

10. Were you satisfied with the ending of the novel? What do you think it is trying to say?