Last year when the fear of an epidemic began to take
hold of the world—and in general, my part of the world, Australia, I began to
compare the coming disaster with the many others that have befallen our planet.
Being an author, of course I began to work out ways of how to create a world
where people were fighting to survive. Then the idea struck of what would a
character do if she/he was whisked back in time from one crazy period in history
to another. To make things easier, I already knew the world where she was going
very well, so had no need to invent one. Little did I know when I began my
latest book that Covid would turn our world upside down. That is the way with disasters;
they strike suddenly and leave a trail of mayhem in their wake.
My family lived through WW11 and as the youngest, I
heard stories as I grew about the war years, and how life was back then. Thus When Destiny Calls was born. Why not
send my heroine back in time to 1940 Britain, when the Blitz was at its worst?
My family lived in North London and that is where I spent my early years.
Highbury
Fields is a large park that features a lot in this latest book of mine. I have
many memories of that area so had no trouble recreating it. I was married in
the beautiful old church alongside the park, as were two of my sisters. My
mother would send me up to the shops along Highbury Barn with a list. No
supermarkets back then, you waited your turn to be served just like everyone else.
All the shopkeepers knew my mother and her family well.
One extremely foggy day when, as they say, you could
not see a hand in front of your face, and the buses stopped running, I
therefore had to walk home from school and the direct route was alongside the
park. How I made it home that day I will never know, but I guess a lot of it
was just a matter of animal instinct. Later, I joined a netball group and we
played on the park courts in the summer evenings.
My one and only remaining sister will be 99 this
year, so was therefore about 18 in 1940, just like Minnie in my story. Chloe,
my main character cares for the old Minnie in an Australian nursing home.
Minnie’s one remaining treasure is a photo album, which contains all her
memories of her years as a young woman during and after the war, so it was
inevitable that Chloe, who listened to Minnie’s many stories of how they all
coped back then, would land back there. Chloe meets up with all the characters
from Minnie’s album, and specifically a man named Bill who owns a dog called
Tiger (hence the wonderful book cover). Was Chloe, by some strange quirk of
Fate, called back in time to meet her destiny?
