Thank you for reading The Antique Dealer’s Daughter. I absolutely loved writing it.
The original idea for this book came from a chance conversation. I’d just finished writing my second novel, The War Widow, and my mind was toying with a new idea about the challenge people must have faced after World War Two to establish life on a different footing now that peace had come. I’d read about the lives of the older women who were called up to the war effort to work as Land Girls and WRENs and in the munitions factories and so on, and I’d certainly understood a reasonable amount about the experiences of those younger children who were evacuated. Then I delivered a talk about books and writing to a WI group in Gloucestershire and met a wonderful lady called Vivian. This was the chance conversation that started it all. Only, in truth it wasn’t entirely chance because of course I’d chosen to speak at that WI in the first place.
Vivian told me about her own experiences as a teenager in wartime London. She was only in her mid-teens in the early days of the war and she was able to tell me how schooling became a nightmare of disrupted lessons in air raid shelters. She explained how, like many young people, she left school and took up the counter work that the older women had left behind.
Vivian made me think about how strange it must have been to have had her entire adolescence consumed by conflict. She made me think how hard my heroine, Emily Sutton, might have had to work to adjust to life after the war, and how the reality of the newfound peace might not have quite been how she’d expected it to be. Vivian also, because of the varying aspects of chance and choice involved in meeting her at all, made me think about how Emily’s life might have been changed through the single act of answering a ringing telephone.
Chance features a lot in Emily’s account of her story, or rather, those choices that other people make, which are out of her control. There’s the powerlessness of her adolescence in wartime London, which was filled with the blackout and rules and ration books. There’s the pressure she feels now to mould herself to a future she doesn’t want within her father’s antiques business, and the steadfast way she resists it which ultimately brings her into Richard’s life. Finally, there’s the burden of being the only person brave enough to step into the squire’s deserted house for the sake of answering his telephone. That single decision brings Richard home to confront the unhealed memories of his brother’s last criminal acts, only to find himself face to face with fresh danger.
That being said, though, every loss of control is underpinned by Emily’s effort to assert her right to make her own choices. It is her choice, after all, to believe Richard is who he says he is when the gossip-mongers get to work. And it is her choice, too, to help him and to learn to let him help her in his turn.
I have loved discovering how Emily will find her own path through life. I know she’s determined enough for the task, even if she doesn’t fully believe it at first. I’m so glad you’ve joined her.