The 1920s have an image of gaiety. Books, films and magazines are full of bright young things tripping around in short skirts, daringly smoking cigarettes in long holders, dancing new dances, driving in fast cars and listening to the wireless or gramophone on sunshine picnics.
I am grateful to my many friends in libraries and archives for producing the alternative view. Whatever personal joys there were, life was not easy for most people. Jobs were scarce, the Depression had arrived and was a standing threat.
In Ireland, newly partitioned, the years of the First World War had been extended by the Anglo-Irish War and then the Civil War within the newly-formed Irish Free State. In both parts of Ireland the economy was in difficulties, emigration was high and bitterness and old feuds were rife.
I have had much help for this novel from friends and family, who have offered me fragments of their own memories, and by complete strangers who have gone to great lengths to provide me with details of road engines, Lagondas and Bentleys, motor and motorcycle racing and rose breeding. If I have failed to use all their material it is simply because they were so very generous.
Some readers may be familiar with Rosie Hamilton’s family from previous novels of mine, but each individual novel stands alone. What Rosie knows about her family is what she is told or finds out. Like most people, there are things she doesn’t know, stories that have been forgotten, people who have moved away.
Finishing this novel in May 2007, I am struck by how very far away Rosie’s world now seems, but also by the fact that the long years of bitterness into which she was born are at last in the process of becoming history.