Today I'm welcoming Clare Flynn to Literascribe. Clare has just published her fifth novel, The Chalky Sea, set during World War II, and I invited her to tell me how she drew on local knowledge and local history when she wrote it. The result is a fascinating article, reminding us that we often don't know the details even of the recent past, in the places familiar to us. If you're a writer and you choose an exotic location, you're all set to research it thoroughly, whether in person or on the internet. But even if you're writing about home, you need to look at it with a fresh eye and delve into records and old images - you will be amazed by what you turn up, as Clare proves here!
I recently moved to Eastbourne, on the Sussex coast. I lived
here as a teenager and because I love the sea and the Downs decided to move
back after twenty years in London. I get very cross when people have a go at
Eastbourne – describing it as “God’s waiting room” and the like. Someone
reviewing my novel Kurinji Flowers referred
to the fact that the main character honeymoons here in the 1930s with the
comment “I suppose someone has to”. There is so much more to this town as I quickly
discovered.
During my school days in the late sixties/ early seventies,
no one spoke of Eastbourne’s pivotal role in the Second World War. It was as if
the town had put its past behind it and wanted to focus on the present. So it
was a big surprise when I moved back and discovered that it was said to have
been the most heavily bombed town in south-east England.
Walking the streets the evidence was there – I just hadn’t
noticed it. There is the ugly 1960s extension tacked onto the Victorian
Cavendish Hotel on the seafront, built to replace the original east wing bombed
in May 1942; the Central Library is a modern building, opened in 1964 to
replace the red brick structure that was destroyed in 1943 and there are post
war buildings to replace Marks & Spencers – bombed while people were doing
their Christmas shopping in December 1942, Barclays Bank (1943), and the central
fire station (1943), St John’s church, Christ Church junior school, to name but
a few – as well as four hundred and seventy four houses. For years I had walked
unknowingly past an unmarked spot, where a blast shelter sustained a direct hit,
killing everyone inside during a raid that across the town centre claimed
thirty-two lives with ninety-nine injured.
One hundred and ninety-nine people died in the bombing raids
on Eastbourne – one hundred and seventy-two of them ordinary civilians. The
raids began in July 1940 and continued until the last bombs fell in March 1944.
As well as being bombed out of their homes, the townspeople endured being
strafed in the streets by machine-gun fire from the fighter-bombers. The early
raids were doubtless to soften up the town ahead of Hitler’s planned invasion, Operation
Sea Lion, which was expected to take place along the Sussex coast. But the
bombing didn’t stop when the invasion was called off. Eastbourne suffered from
bombs dumped on the return leg from London and the Midlands but, being just a
short hop across the Channel, it was subjected to “tip and run” raids with
bombers coming in low under the radar then, as they reached the coast, climbing
up over Beachy Head to the Downs, banking and swooping down to attack the town
before nipping back across the Channel. These attacks were not aimed at
strategic targets – there were none – they were designed to cause terror and
damage morale.
Another factor that may have made the town a target,
especially in the run-up to the catastrophic allied Dieppe raid, was the
presence, from 1941, of thousands of Canadian soldiers until the D-Day
preparations of 1944. They were essentially the allies’ reserve army and thus
an attractive target for the enemy.
The town also witnessed the loss of German life. The first
“kill” over Eastbourne of a German fighter plane happened at the end of my
road. A twin-engine Messerschmitt Me110 was shot down and crashed into the
grounds of the Aldro School – now part of Brighton University’s Eastbourne
campus. The pilot, Hauptmann Ernst Hollekamp, already dead, landed on the roof
of another school half a mile away, while the rear gunner parachuted into the
sea and drowned. For years, the people of Eastbourne believed the crashed plane
to have been a Henkel bomber until the pilot’s widow visited the town and
confirmed he had flown a Messerschmitt.
With the heavy bombardment of Eastbourne, which began a
month before the London Blitz, the vast majority of the population evacuated,
so that the local MP described the place as “Ghost Town on Sea”. The arrival of
the Canadian army must have been welcome to the pubs, cafes and retailers who remained
open throughout the war.
With all this history on my doorstep, it was impossible to
resist the idea of setting a book here. It was not in the plan when I moved,
but within two months of arriving I had started writing The Chalky Sea. The book is set mostly in Eastbourne, but also in
Aldershot, where numerous Canadian regiments were garrisoned throughout the war
years, and a little bit in Ontario, Canada.
The challenge in writing fiction based on actual events is
to be respectful to those involved while also being accurate. It is probable
that relatives of victims of the bombings still live in the town. I have used
real bombings, but all the characters involved are completely fictitious. I
have tried to ensure that I stuck closely to the dates and places that were
actually bombed, beginning with the first attack on the town in Whitley Road at
11.04 on July 7th 1940 – a Sunday morning. If people die in the
book, then people actually died in that raid at the time. Sadly with so many
raids there was no need for invention.
The book follows two main characters – Gwen, an Eastbourne
woman, alone and refusing to evacuate the town after the departure of her
officer husband to an unknown destination for what we now know as Special
Operations; and Jim, a young Canadian farmer, who joins up in a fatalistic
effort to escape from a broken heart. The
Chalky Sea follows their individual journeys and examines the impact of war
on them and how it changes them profoundly.
Clare Flynn writes historical fiction with a strong sense of time and place and compelling
characters. Her books often deal with characters who are displaced - forced
out of their comfortable lives and familiar surroundings. She is a graduate of Manchester
University where she read English Language and Literature.
Born in Liverpool she is the eldest of five
children. After a career in international marketing, working on brands from
nappies to tinned tuna and living in Paris, Milan, Brussels and Sydney, she ran
her own consulting business for 15 years and now lives in Eastbourne where she writes
full-time – and can look out of her window and see the sea.
When not writing and reading, Clare loves
to paint with watercolours and grabs any available opportunity to travel -
sometimes under the guise of research.
Links
Website http://www.clareflynn.co.uk
Twitter - https://twitter.com/clarefly
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/authorclareflynn
Amazon Author Page http://www.amazon.com/Clare-Flynn/e/B008O4T2LC/
Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6486156.Clare_Flynn
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