This novel was inspired by finding and inheriting one hundred years of family letters stored in tin trunks in my ancestral home. I also found a great number of photographs there that emphasised the characters of those I was going to write about.
The theme running through the novel is of a love triangle between my grandmother, my father and my mother.
 

 

"So this is how Women’s Suffrage started. When milk is heated in too full a saucepan, as it reaches boiling point it bursts its lid and the milk flows over. This was happening to women all over Europe. They were talking to each other, commiserating and protesting their lot. Women in the company of women were not restricted. It was as though all these saucepans were openly boiling over in pockets of houses in both the city and country. We were such a divided gender.personal rebellion into war with willing military loyalty, killing themselves and others with insensitive impunity, and certainly to their own heroic accolade. But what about the plight of us women? They stayed at home to weep and mourn their menĚs departure or disappearance. Society was disrupted. Whether on one side or another, the cyclical return of war was always arranged by men. It was remote from womenĚs desire. The old cliche held then as it does now: what is the point of women bearing the agony of childbirth if their male babies are to become future cannon fodder when full grown? Life and time has not changed that at all."