Voices from the Past

It’s a question I get asked all the time: “How do you research your books?” It’s a good question, and one that any writer of historical fiction should be prepared to answer.

I research my fiction the same way I once researched my doctoral thesis, and it’s pretty typical of the approach that most historians use. I begin with general survey histories, which ensure I have a good overall understanding of the period, conflict, or region in question. From there, I move on to specialist histories, the sort of books that often begin life as a thesis for someone else’s research degree. For this book, I was interested in such diverse topics as food rationing, the propaganda efforts of the Ministry of Information, and the covert work done by SOE agents in France, and I found a lot of the information I needed in specialist histories.

This stage of secondary-source research takes me months, and involves my plowing through scores of books and articles, all with a view to building a reasonably convincing portrait of life as it was lived at a certain time and place. But secondary sources alone aren’t enough. At best, they’re wallpaper in an empty room.

To fill that room, to attempt to understand the lives of people who inhabited the past, I need to hear from people with first-hand, direct, and personal experience of past events. Only through their recollections can I hope to even come close to the truth, and in so doing discover the stories at the heart of my books.

With Goodnight from London, there was no question of where I would begin: with my own grandmother, Myra Isabella Nicholson Moir, known as Nikki to her friends.

Foncie Pulice/Courtesy John Moir

Nikki Moir with daughter Wendy, circa 1943.

Born in Alloa, Scotland, Nikki emigrated to Vancouver, Canada, with her family when she was a girl. Although her early travels left her with an adventurous spirit, excitement was hard to come by in Depression-era Vancouver. After leaving school at sixteen, she did a secretarial course in typing and shorthand and soon landed a job at the Vancouver News-Herald. There she worked on the women’s pages, “the usual spot for female reporters,” as she later recalled. The News-Herald was run on a shoestring, and it showed.

“We were working for less than peanuts in the upstairs of an old building on Homer Street. You walked down an alley and up a long stairway into one big room. Along one side were some makeshift partitioned offices. There were hardly any typewriters, and it was always a fight between eager reporters to get their stories done without enough machines to go around. We had almost no library, or morgue as they used to be called. Instead we relied on an elderly newsman with a phenomenal memory.”

Not long after, she met my grandfather, Reg Moir, who was working at the paper as a sports reporter. In 1940, their daughter Wendy, my mother, was born. In late 1942, Reg joined the Royal Canadian Air Force as an information officer, and was eventually posted to London. To save money, Nikki moved in with her parents, then went back to the News-Herald as a staff writer. “Most of our able-bodied men were gone,” she recalled years later, “and I was given assignment beats that I would never have had otherwise. I had two major beats, the courthouse and the military.” It was interesting but at times emotionally draining work, and she soon learned to 
stifle her own feelings when going after a story. “I was there to work, not to cry or show any other emotion. I was an observer who had to record what I saw and heard for my paper.” And she also learned that there was no excuse for failing to get a story. “If you were sent out on an assignment, you came back with a story, no matter what.”

She worked throughout the war, and after Reg returned from service abroad and decided he wanted to go to law school, Nikki supported the family (my aunt Terry and uncle John were born after the war) by working at the Vancouver Province as a feature writer. She was still working as a freelance feature writer in the 1970s when I was a little girl.

I loved looking through her clipping books, which bulged with the many stories she’d told over decades of work as a newspaperwoman, though sadly I never got around to asking her many questions about her work. To be honest, she was always a little cagey on the subject of being a woman in a male-dominated field, and I suspect it must have been pretty awful at times. In an era when women were expected to put up with unfair and sometimes outright harassing behavior, complaining was often seen as a tacit admission of not being able to handle the job. After being screamed at by one irascible editor of the most hard-bitten variety, for example, she kept her cool—it helped, she felt, that she’d grown up with five elder brothers—and was rewarded, once he realized she “wasn’t crumpling,” with a smile and some rare words of praise.

Nikki never won any awards for her writing, for she worked in a business that prized speed over style and economy over poetry. But she was a pioneer in her field all the same, and she helped to pave the way for my friends who work as journalists today. Always curious, always learning, she even went back to school after Reg died in 1980, and graduated from Simon Fraser University with a bachelor’s degree not long after her sixty-ninth birthday.

Goodnight from London was never meant to be Nikki’s book, not least because she was a private person who didn’t enjoy the spotlight; like most journalists, she preferred asking questions to answering them. She was my starting point, my inspiration, but she was never Ruby. I began with my grandmother, but I still had so much more to learn.

I particularly wanted to understand the experiences of women who lived in Britain during the war, so I returned to the oral history project I had conducted in 1993 as part of the research for my doctoral thesis. The project consisted of fifteen long-form interviews with a group of women living at a senior’s residence in Oxford, and fortunately I had thought to save the transcriptions on every computer I’ve since owned. Reading through the hundreds of pages of interviews for the first time in almost twenty years, I was 
thrilled to find a treasure trove of details that added life and authenticity to my developing novel.

I have especially vivid memories of the hours I spent with one of the women, a Mrs. E.H. (I promised anonymity to the participants in 1993 and feel obliged to maintain it now.) Born in 1915 in Cardiff, she came to London with her sister in the late 1930s, both of them certain, as she recalled, that they’d soon be “digging up the gold out of the pavements.” She worked as a secretary in a law office, and during the war was also a shelter warden and a Red Cross volunteer. Warm and chatty, with an amazing memory for details, she was an absolute fount of information about life in London during the war. Here she talks about the wearying routine of life during the Blitz:

“Warnings used to start as we left the office; as we came out of the Tube—they used to start at half past six. Well, you were lucky if you were home before that. And as soon as the warning went we were supposed to go to be on duty at the shelter, and then the all clear used to go about half past seven in the morning, so we’d come back, have a wash, and go to the office. We used to get some sleep—it was on a concrete floor, though!”

My own oral history project pales in scope, however, when set against the vast library of material held by the Imperial War Museum’s Sound Archive, which was founded in 1972 and now holds more than sixty thousand hours of professionally recorded oral history evidence. Many thousands of hours of material have been digitized and are easily accessible via the museum’s website, and while researching Goodnight from London I listened to dozens of interviews with people who lived through the Blitz, who served in the armed or auxiliary services, or who simply had memories to share of everyday life during the war.

I also returned to an archive that was familiar to me from my years as a graduate student: the Mass Observation holdings at the University of Sussex. Mass Observation was a social research organization, founded in 1937 and active until the 1950s (it has since been revived), which sought to collect information on the everyday lives of ordinary Britons. I made extensive use of its archive when working on my doctorate in the early 1990s, and then consulted its more limited online archive while researching this novel. It was from Mass Observation that I found the memories that informed my description of life in wartime Brighton, in Coventry after the November 1940 bombings, and in the Edge Hill neighborhood of Liverpool after the Durning Road disaster.

The personal recollections of people who lived through the war—direct, vivid, startlingly intimate at times—were critical to my understanding of the story I wanted to tell.

For example, it isn’t enough to say, when describing a dinner during the war, that a family ate sausages. Who cares? If, however, the people eating the sausages complain about how they taste, and fret over what unsavory ingredients may be hiding in the sausages, and talk about their conversation with the butcher, and if all of that is based on the first-hand recollections of people who actually had such experiences, then the scene in question becomes more than a one-dimensional narrative. Then it becomes, ideally, something far closer to the truth.

Nearly all of the people whose reminiscences of the Second World War were captured by Mass Observation’s interviewers, as well as by historians at the Imperial War Museum, are dead now, or too infirm to sit through extensive interviews with curious researchers. The youngest of the women I spoke with in 1993 would be well over a hundred years old today. Nikki, my grandmother, died at the age of ninety-five in December 2014. They are gone, but their memories endure. Their stories live on.

It was hard, at times, for me to write Goodnight from London and know that my grandmother would never have the chance to read it. I hope she’d have enjoyed it, and perhaps be secretly delighted by the parallels she found between her experiences and those of Ruby. Most of all, I hope she’d have known that I wrote it as a tribute not only to her, but also to my grandfather, to those who worked so hard for victory, and to everyone who endured those long, hard years of war. Their sacrifices will not be forgotten.