Personally, I blame Michael Morpurgo.
In 2014, I contributed to his anthology of memories of the First World War, Only Remembered. I wrote about my great uncle Stanley Killingback, a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, killed in action in France, 1916. I knew very little about his life, but the image of my grandmother’s Remembrance Day poppy tucked into the frame of her lost brother’s portrait has always stayed with me. Honoured to be writing for one of our greatest authors, I fussed for quite a while to make sure that my few hundred words of text for the book weren’t too embarrassing. I found a photo and a song to go with them before emailing everything to Michael. And that was that.
Except that it wasn’t. That night I dreamed I was in a queue waiting for admission to prison. It had been discovered that my great uncle had been a deserter and as he hadn’t paid for his crime, I had to do so in his place. It was the same for everyone in the queue with me – they were paying the price for someone else’s misdemeanour. It was an image powerful enough to stick in my mind – and the idea of heritage crime was born.
So my heartfelt thanks to the Right Honourable Charlie Falconer, Baron Falconer of Thoroton, and the Right Honourable Douglas Alexander for putting me on a sound legal footing, to Isabelle Dupuy and Sybille Wunderlich for the Haitian and German translations, and the extravagantly gifted team at Penguin Random House led by my editor Kelly Hurst. Oh, and Sam Copeland at RCW, always the most stylish of literary agents.
There are many organisations around the world who work for those who are not to blame. Check out Reprieve, Amnesty, the Prison Reform Trust and the Howard League for Penal Reform to find out more.