More
than 20 years ago I was off work with flu, lying on the sofa, listening to the radio.
The programme was called ‘The Man who was Sammy’ –
This
is the clipping from Radio Times which sparked my idea for the story.
The
programme ended with the brother and sister reunited He had escaped from the
gulag, a story stranger than fiction. This gave me the germ of an idea for a
novel – the story of a woman separated from her lover when he is arrested and
sent to the gulag. And how she never gives up hope that they will be reunited.
I played about with the idea for ages but it didn’t get any further. After all,
what did I know of Stalin’s Russia?
However,
it seemed that the idea would not go away and over the years several things
came together. I read a book called The Long Walk about 3 men escaping from the
gulag, (Subsequently made into a film called The Way Back. Then, while working
in the library, I came across a book called ‘I was a Soviet Worker’. It was by
an American who had been invited to the USSR to work in a factory and help the
Soviets in Stalin’s Five Year Plan.
So
there I had the bones of a story – I knew it was possible to escape, and I had
a legitimate reason for my British heroine and her lover being in Moscow in the
1930s.
All
I had to do now was put it all together in a romantic novel - and do a lot more research of course. It
was the first book I actually finished. It went through many revisions over the
years but each time I sent it out it came winging back – many times. Finally I
gave up and got on with my next novel. Happily now, after having eight novels
and nine novellas published, ‘Song of Memories’ had found a home with Books We
Love and has just been published in paperback and as an E-book.
It
has certainly vindicated the advice given to writers – ‘never throw anything
away’.
