I’m often asked by readers of my first published novel, The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society, where I got the inspiration for my characters from, and I answer truthfully that they are all total inventions. And then I have to add that the disguise adopted by the main character, 75 year-old Agnes, was borrowed from a feisty septuagenarian I’d met in the gym, who always wore a baseball cap over her shoulder-length frizz of ginger hair. (If you haven’t read it yet, why not boorrow it from the libary, or buy it here, via Paypal!)

Yesterday morning I was sorting out the clothes for my trip to Hong Kong next Wednesday (more of that later!) while listening to Fi Glover on Saturday Live, and I was fascinated to hear about the inspiration for the Larkin family in The Darling Buds of May.

David Dell was eight when he and his 5 siblings were taken on his first ever holiday in a bulging bright blue van. He remembers stopping at the small village shop and the rare treat of being bought ice creams, but he hadn’t noticed the man staring at them from his car across the road, as one by one they emerged from the van.
Years later, it became clear that this man was H.E. Bates himself, observing the scene with a writer’s keen eye for detail: the description of this scene in his autobiography make this far more like fact than wishful supposition.

It was an oddly weird sensation for me as a listener, hearing David Dell explain how his entire family had been caught like butterflies and preserved between the pages of a book for generations to come. It must have been amazing for him when he came across that passage in H E Bates’ autobiography.

I’m always touched by real items from decades ago, such as letters or scribbled messages on the back of postcards. Gardening Husband is a keen collector of stamps and postcards from the Far East, but he usually doesn’t bother to read those messages. However, he does know that I’m more interested in the glimpses of real lives than the potential value of a rare picture or postage stamp, so when he came across a few letters and scraps of paper among a job lot of ephemera, he handed them to me.

At that time I was in the planning stage for a novel that would be mainly set in contemporary Hong Kong, a place I have visited several times because I have a sister who lives on Lamma, one of the outlying islands, and owns a beautiful shop in Central, selling antique oriental robes and other artefacts.

After reading these letters, written by an English woman in Canton in the early 1920s, and two other love letters four years earlier from a young Chinese girl to the same man, my brain went into overdrive. I didn’t know precisely how I would use these epistolic treasures, but of one thing I was sure: a significant section of the book would take place in the 20s or early 30s and the setting would be moved from Canton, to Hong Kong.

I’ll soon be posting more about these letters and how they feature in my new novel, Paper Lanterns . Meanwhile, I’ll be interested to hear about any other real-life material that other writers have transformed into fiction.