THE STORIES BEHIND THE STORIES – FOR THEIR COUNTRY’S GOOD TRILOGY.

More inside information about the inspirations behind another story. Anyone who has read my short story, Ooh, Air Margrit, https://rebeccabrynblog.wordpress.com/2018/05/19/ooh-air-margrit/ will know that I come from ‘a good family’. Not my words, the words of the lay preacher who conducted my mother’s funeral. Read the short story if you want a laugh, though it was very embarrassing at the time! Naughty man… not what I expected from a lay preacher.

Sometimes, it helps if the dark secrets your grandmother is tight-lipped about are kept hidden, but sometimes, with a little digging, they lead to an explosion of family history you had no idea about. Sometimes, these secrets make a great story.

There was a rumour during my childhood that one of my forebears had murdered a gamekeeper and been transported to Australia. No one would say more, and the rumour teased me for years. Was there any truth in it? It was after my mother died – why do we always take an interest in the past when those who might have told us about it are gone – that I began to delve in my family history.

I began looking on ‘My Heritage’ and discovered my grandmother was born in Yardley Hastings, on Lord Northampton’s Castle Ashby estate, in Northamptonshire. I was extremely fortunate to stumble across a local history website that had relevant and revealing records. Boy, does it help if your forebears are convicted criminals! It took a while, but I discovered that my g-g-g-uncle and two of his cousins had killed one of Lord Northampton’s gamekeepers in Yardley Chase in 1840. Further research uncovered newspaper reports of the trial, committal and trial transcripts, the name of the convict ship the three lads were transported to Van Diemen’s Land on, and their convict records and conditional pardons, right down to their physical descriptions.

Here were the bones of a story that needed telling, and since the cat was definitely out of the bag, and those who might have been embarrassed by my tale were long-dead, I began writing.

Whilst, Ella, the main female character is fictional, the three male characters were real people although I changed their names in the story – they do after all have descendants living in Australia and Canada, two of whom have since contacted me after reading the novels. I had no idea these relations existed, and it was wonderful to connect with them.

It’s impossible to research and write about the eighteen and early nineteen hundreds in Britain without being shocked by the lack of rights for women, and this historical iniquity profoundly shaped much of the story and led me to explore the issue through further novels.

My love of my native rural Northamptonshire meant I felt at home while writing Jem and Ella’s story, despite living a couple of hundred miles away, and I felt very close to my forebears as I wrote. Lacemaking and brickmaking are as much apart of my heritage as shoe making is, and it was wonderful to immerse myself in my family’s past and re-imagine their lives.

Love and loss seem to have become an essential ingredient to my storytelling, my ‘therapy’ to deal with my own, I suppose, but in this case, the death of the gamekeeper and the separation of the exiled from their families for life, was very hard to write about. These were real people, ordinary young lads, who did a terrible thing in the heat of the moment and would pay for it for the rest of their lives; they could never return home. It would have been an event that caused splits in the community and affected the entire village for years to come. I couldn’t leave Jem and Ella apart, though could I? The tale takes us from a sleepy English village to the penal colonies of Van Diemen’s Land and the goldfields of Australia and follows Jem and Ella through forgiveness, love, and heartbreak across decades as they struggle to be re-united. If there is a tale that proves ‘love conquers all’ this is surely it.

http://mybook.to/OnDifferentShores

http://mybook.to/BeneathStrangeStars

http://mybook.to/OnCommonGround

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