During the writing of Eye of the Storm, Georgia Giacopazzi had been able to recall the six years of war and women friends vividly but with objectivity. It was only now, with the proof copies out, that she could allow herself to become involved with the people who, in the writing, had been fictional characters. A long air journey was the perfect place to let the memory drift.
When interviewers and features editors wanted to know about the early years.
‘When did you first know that you wanted to be a writer, Mrs Giacopazzi?’
‘I have never wanted to be anything else. I guess I’ve always done it.’
‘Making little books like the Brontë children?’
‘Nothing so marvellous as theirs, of course.’
The truth, Mrs Giacopazzi?
The truth is that until the day of their funeral it had never occurred to me to want to write or that I could. Before that day, I had supposed that modern writers were men like Robert Crockford, educated but poverty stricken, or like Somerset Maugham, who travelled to exotic places and knew all the right people, or Jane Austen, who was special. I had supposed that modern women novelists must have been educated at Girton or at least to have been born into those circles where uncles and fathers had contacts in the publishing world. And a room of one’s own and an income of two hundred a year as Virginia Woolf said was necessary.
The truth is that it never occurred to me until the day when I first met my own people. I scarcely knew of their existence.
And you wanted to write about them?
To put them down on paper, yes. To make some sort of record of their existence. It was a short step from there to writing fiction.
And getting published.
Yes, but it wasn’t too difficult just after the war.