by Louise Allen
I tend to start writing and then identify what
I need to research, rather than the other way around—although I do work out the geography of where the opening is set in some detail. With an imaginary town, village or house I will probably draw a map or plan. If there is a journey I use original route books, maps and coaching timetables.
With Regency Rumours, once I knew the date and the main historical characters, I needed to know what the house and park were like at the time and glean what information I could about the real people who would appear in my story.
Usually I know enough about the period to start and then look up things as I need to—mostly using my research collection of almost a thousand books. I know now what I don’t know and have to be very careful to check: politics, for write every example, is a grey area!
When I go into completely new territory, as I did with a book set in 410AD, I established the chronology of the real events and wrote leaving blanks, or highlighting areas in different colours where I needed to go back and fact-check. What was the name of the road out of Rome the Visigoths would have taken? What was the layout of a public bathhouse? Were togas worn in 410AD? And so on. By doing that I try and avoid the research taking over the story and dominating my characters.
What one piece of advice would you give to a writer at the start of their career?
Not one piece, but three. Firstly, read everything you can get your hands on: first for pleasure and then with an analytical eye. Why did that make you laugh, make you cry, make you identify with the heroine or impatiently flick over a few pages?
Secondly, develop your writing muscles. Try and write every day, even if it is only a few paragraphs, and then apply that same analytical eye to what you have written.
And, thirdly, don’t despair if it takes a while.
No one manages to play a musical instrument, run a marathon or paint a great picture the first time they try. Writing is a craft and an art and it has to be practised.
LOUISE ALLEN—A WRITER’S LIFE
Where and when?
I have a heated studio in the garden that has my desk, PC and my library. What it doesn’t have is a kettle and I have yet to persuade my husband that I should have a flagpole to run up a signal for ‘send tea and cake’. Because I spent so many years writing in the evening after work I find it very hard to write in the morning or early afternoon. I can do proofreading and so on then, but not the creative stuff, so not much gets written before four o’clock.
Paper and pen, or straight on to the PC?
My handwriting is dreadful and I think too fast to get the story down coherently, so I write straight on to the computer using a very fast, very inaccurate, ‘three fingers and two thumbs’ typing style. I read back every few paragraphs and sort out the typos. The next day I edit what I wrote the day before. When I get about a third of the way through I revise from the beginning and again at halfway and two-thirds. Then I let it settle for a few days and revise right through.
Music or silence?
Silence. I can’t work with music on because I find myself listening to it and not to what I am supposed to be thinking about.
Do you have a writing schedule?
I couldn’t manage without one! When I have agreed my deadline with my editor, I work out how many days I have free before that date and divide my target number of words by that figure. Then the first day I write that many words and some over. The next day I recalculate and, again, aim to go over target. I end up writing about a thousand words a day, and that gives me time at the end for final revisions and also builds in a little space for unexpected events —getting flu or revisions for a previous book arriving.
Coffee or tea?
Definitely tea! Assam, for preference, with loose leaves and made in the pot.
ABOUT THE NATIONAL TRUST
The National Trust was founded in 1895 by three Victorian philanthropists—Miss Octavia Hill, Sir Robert Hunter and Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley.
‘The need of quiet, the need of air, the need of exercise, and…the sight of sky and of things growing seem human needs, common to all men.’
Octavia Hill (1838-1912)
Concerned about the impact of uncontrolled development and industrialisation, they set up the Trust to act as a guardian for the nation. For more than a hundred years the National Trust has looked after places which connect the present and the future to the past. It works to preserve and protect the coastline, countryside and buildings of England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The Trust does this in a range of ways: through practical caring and conservation, through learning and discovery, and through encouraging millions of people to visit and enjoy their national heritage.
Without its many members, visitors and volunteers, it would be unable to carry on with its work. However, it is not just through visiting properties that people help out. The Trust’s many commercial activities include National Trust tearooms and shops, and also holiday cottages—an increasingly popular choice for places to stay.
The Trust protects over seven hundred miles of coastline and in total it looks after 626,051 acres (253,349 hectares) of countryside, moorland, beaches and coastline.
Among the historic properties in the Trust’s care are two hundred and fifteen houses and gardens, forty castles, seventy-six nature reserves, six World Heritage Sites, twelve lighthouses, and forty-three pubs and inns.
The millions of objects in the care of the National Trust reflect its diversity. Conservation staff and volunteers care for an astonishing range of structures and contents—from over twenty-six sets of samurai armour and nineteen magnificent paintings by Turner, to the Oscar awarded to George Bernard Shaw, the national collection of lawnmowers, fifty-seven meat strainers and a photograph album the size of a postage stamp.
An estimated fifty million people visited the National Trust’s open-air properties in 2012.
Visit www.nationaltrust.org.uk to find out more.
© National Trust 2013
WIMPOLE HALL HISTORY
Adapted from Houses of the National Trust by Lydia Greeves
(National Trust Books, 2013)
When Rudyard Kipling visited his daughter Elsie at Wimpole, a few months after she and her husband Captain George Bambridge took up residence at the house in 1936, he was moved to remark that he hoped she had not bitten off more than she could chew. Two years later the Bambridges embarked on the restoration and refurnishing of the largest house in Cambridgeshire. From 1713 to 1740 the house was the property of Edward Harley, Second Earl of Oxford, who entertained a brilliant circle of writers, scholars and artists there, Swift and Pope among them. Lord Harley commissioned eminent architect James Gibbs to build a strikingly opulent baroque chapel. Gibbs also designed the long library to house Harley’s exceptional collection of books and manuscripts, the largest and most important ever assembled by a private individual in England and later to form the nucleus of the British Library.
Wimpole’s next owner, Philip Yorke, First Earl of Hardwicke, commissioned architect Henry Flitcroft to design a gallery as a setting for his finest paintings. Now used to display pictures particularly associated with the house, such as The Stag Hunt by John Wootton, who frequently visited Wimpole in Lord Harley’s time, the room has long sash windows framed by red curtains and its grey-green walls help to create an atmosphere that is both restful and warm.
Wimpole’s most individual interior, John Soane’s Yellow Drawing Room, was added fifty years later, in the early 1790s, for Philip Yorke’s great-nephew, the Third Earl. Running from the north front into the centre of the house, the room opens out into a domed oval at the inner end that is lit from a lantern in the roof above. Yellow silk on the walls sets off blue upholstery on the gilt chairs and on the long settees curved round two semicircular apses on the inner wall, with a large painting of cherubs at play above the chimneypiece that divides them. The overall effect is of a chapel transformed into a room of exceptional elegance and grace.
Soane�
�s indulgent bath house, with a grand double staircase sweeping down to a tiled pool which holds over nine thousand litres (two thousand gallons) of water, is a delightful reminder of another side of eighteenth-century life.
When the Bambridges moved to Wimpole they were faced with refurnishing a largely empty house, the contents of which had been gradually dispersed. Aided by royalties from the Kipling estate, which Mrs Bambridge inherited in 1936, they bought on their travels abroad and at auction and Mrs Bambridge continued to buy after her husband’s death in 1943. While he was responsible for two Tissots and a portrait by Tilly Kettle, she acquired portraits connected with the house and paintings by Mercier, Hudson and Romney. Porcelain figures on show are from her collection and she also added notable books to the library, including some rare editions of Kipling’s work.
Wimpole’s extensive wooded park fully matches the grandeur of the house and reflects the influence of some of the most famous names in the history of landscape gardening. The great lime avenue running to the south, its unyielding lines striking through a patchwork of fields like a grassy motorway, was originally created by Charles Bridgeman, who was employed by Lord Harley in the 1720s to extend an elaborate formal layout which already included the east and west avenues to either side of the house.
Remarkably, these remains of what was once an extensive scheme of axial avenues, canalised ponds, ha-has and bastions survived the attentions of ‘Capability’ Brown and his disciple William Emes later in the century, both of whom set about ‘naturalising’ the park. The view from the north front, artfully framed by the clumps of trees with which Brown replaced a felled avenue, looks over his serpentine ornamental lake to a hillock crowned with a three-towered Gothick ruin. Built in 1774, this eye-catcher was based on designs by Sanderson Miller made twenty-five years before. Brown’s belts of trees defining and sheltering the park were thickened and extended by Humphry Repton, who produced a Red Book for the Third Earl in 1801, but Repton also reintroduced a touch of formality, creating the small flower garden enclosed by iron railings on the north side of the house.
Sir John Soane’s home farm to the north of the house, built in a pleasing mixture of brick, wood, tile and thatch, was also commissioned by the
Third Earl, who was passionately interested in farming and agricultural improvement. Gaily painted wagons and carts now fill the thatched barn, but the surrounding paddocks and pens make up Wimpole’s rare breeds farm.
A short distance south-east of the house is the parish church. Substantially rebuilt to Flitcroft’s design in 1749, it is all that remains of the village that was swept away to create the park. In the north chapel, the only part of the medieval building not demolished in the mid-eighteenth century, the recumbent effigy of the Third Earl, with his coronet at his feet, dominates a number of grandiose monuments to successive owners of this palatial place, sleeping peacefully in the midst of all they once enjoyed. Banks and ditches in the grass to the south mark the house plots of medieval villagers who tilled the land centuries ago, the ridge and furrow they created still visible on a slope of old pasture.
NATIONAL TRUST MEMBERSHIP
Join today and you’ll enjoy:
• FREE entry and parking at more than three hundred historic houses and gardens.
• FREE parking at our countryside and coastline locations.
• Your Members’ Handbook—a complete guide to all the places you can visit.
• Regional Newsletters packed with details of special events at locations near you.
• Three editions of the National Trust magazine, featuring news, views, gardening and letters, exclusively for members.
plus…
• Your membership will get you free admission to properties cared for by the National Trust for Scotland.
• There are also agreements with a number of other countries. If you’re visiting any of these places and have a valid membership card, you can visit their National Trust facilities FREE or at a concessionary rate.
Join online today and you will be e-mailed a temporary admission card, so you can make the most of your membership and start visiting
National Trust properties straight away.
Visit www.nationaltrust.org.uk for more details or phone 0844 800 1895.
Best of all, you’ll know that you are helping to protect the places you enjoy for ever, for everyone.
FROM THE USA
More than forty thousand Americans belong to the Royal Oak Foundation, the National Trust’s US membership affiliate.
A not-for-profit organisation, the Royal Oak helps the Trust through the generous tax-deductible support of members and friends by making grants towards its work.
Royal Oak member benefits include:
• Free admission to properties of the National
Trust and National Trust for Scotland.
• The National Trust Handbook.
• Three editions of the National Trust members’ magazine.
• The quarterly Royal Oak newsletter.
Royal Oak also awards scholarships to US residents to study in Britain and sponsors lectures, tours and events in both the US and UK, designed to inform Americans of the Trust’s work.
Visit www.royal-oak.org
© The National Trust 2013
This is a work of fiction. References to historical events, real people or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
All Rights Reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Enterprises II B.V./S.à.r.l. The text of this publication or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the prior consent of the publisher in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
® and TM are trademarks owned and used by the trademark owner and/or its licensee. Trademarks marked with ® are registered with the United Kingdom Patent Office and/or the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market and in other countries.
First published in Great Britain 2013
Mills & Boon, an imprint of Harlequin (UK) Limited,
Eton House, 18-24 Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey TW9 1SR
© Melanie Hilton 2013
Front cover image of Wimpole Hall
© National Trust Images/Andrew Butler 2013
eISBN: 978-1-472-01717-8
