The resources for writing a novel set during the period of the Second World War are formidable and I am very grateful for books, archives, exhibitions and websites. I have used many sources, but the ones that have contributed most to this particular story are the unconsidered trifles which I have been offered by individuals.
It never ceases to amaze me how generous people are when I ask my questions, a fireman who contacts former colleagues about hose fittings, young County Council staff who ring grandparents to find out about the prisoner of war camp, now lost under a new housing estate, friends who produce wartime cookery books and old photographs, newspaper editors who offer me access to their wartime editions.
For the first time in the Hamilton sequence, I have memories of my own, my first experience of moonlight on the night of the Belfast Blitz when the siren sounded in peaceful Armagh. There are harsher memories for my husband, who spent the nights of the Blitz in a shelter at the bottom of a garden in South London and experienced the V2’s at school in the City. I am grateful to him for the details of the machinery of war, the day by day preoccupation of every small boy at that time.
Ulster was the only part of the United Kingdom to be invaded. But it was a friendly invasion and the links made are still cherished by many, like the Hamiltons at Rathdrum, for whom the war brought joy as well as sadness, hope and possibility, as well as the weariness of a long hard time.