Who? Tom Palmer on Finding Characters for your Historical Fiction

Who? 

When I write a history story I have to decide when the action is going to take place – and also where to set it. I also have to decide what is going to happen based on the setting. Then how it happens. And why it happens. But – for me – writing historical fiction always has to begin with the character.

The who. That who is usually a real person who lived through a period of history that fascinates me. That’s my character.

Once I have the who, the where and when look after themselves. That’s my setting. I need to set the book in the time and place that person lived. If you are basing your story on a real person this is the easy part.

Now – with more research in books, online and in film, maybe – I can find out what they did. Along with how they did what they did, I have a plot or a storyline.

And, finally, why. What motivated my historical figure to do what they did? 

That’s my WRITING CHALLENGE for all you young Time Tunnellers. 

Can you think up a good idea for a story based on a real historical figure that you are interested in? 

Now ask yourself the questions:

Who do you want to write about from history? 

When did they live? 

And where were they when they made their contribution to history? 

What did they do in that time and place that so interests you? 

How did they go about it? 

And – very importantly – why? 

For me this is the starting point for every book I write. Some answers come easier than others, but, if you keep going and research deeply into your who, where, when, what, how and why, then you should have a decent story on your hands.

Tom Palmer is the author of over 60 children's books, including award-winning historical fiction for young people. 

Find out more about Tom here. 

D-Day 80th anniversary special - by Robin Scott-Elliot

Bob Johns paused on the stairs and cocked his head to one side. He could hear his father’s snores. He smiled to himself and stepped carefully down into the hall of 129 Jervis Road, the small, terraced house in Portsmouth where he’d spent the first 14 years of his life.

Outside, he pulled the front door quietly shut behind him and sat on the steps to put his shoes on before plunging his hands into his pockets, turning up his jacket collar and hurrying off past the Royal Navy dockyards. Did he look back? If he did it would have been the last time Bob Johns ever saw home.

Bob Johns

Fast forward a couple of years, to the early hours of 6 June 1944 and Bob Johns was taking a deep breath before leaping into the night sky above Normandy, one of the first… I was going to say men to take part in D-day but Bob Johns was not a man, he was a boy. Bob Johns was 16, and he shouldn’t have been there.

His story is one of so many found within the history of Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Europe 80 years ago, the day of days for so many young men and the end of days for plenty among them.

I have read and written plenty about D-day – including a podcast, Wars That Shaped The World – and been interested in it since I was a teenager and persuaded my parents to drive us from our home in Belgium so I could go and walk the ground, see Pegasus Bridge, Omaha beach, St Mere Eglise and all the other places that fill the history books.

Yet for all that I only came across the story of Bob Johns this week, stumbled over it while looking up something else. It’s why history fascinates me – there is always something new to learn, to discover to understand. History is always alive.

I can’t remember if we stopped in Ranville on that teenage trip or subsequent visits. Ranville, a small Norman village, occupies a footnote in history – it was the first village or town in France to be liberated. Among the men of the 6th Airborne Division who drove the Germans out at 2.30am was the boy Bob.

He's still there in Ranville, laid to rest forever in the war cemetery outside the village. On his white marble tombstone, the curved top matching all the other 2,417 graves, is carved the winged badge of the Parachute Regiment, the date of his death and his age, 16. It’s an age that places him exactly between my two daughters.

Bob's grave

There is an inscription on it, requested by his parents, Henry and Daisy… ‘He died as he lived, fearlessly.’

He was the second of Henry and Daisy’s five children to be killed in the war. His eldest brother, William, had been lost at sea in 1940 when his submarine was sunk in the Atlantic.

Perhaps that’s where the impulse came from for Bob to run off and join the army. When he turned up at the recruiting office, the sergeant must have had his suspicions, although Bob was tall and broad for his age – but nevertheless his age was only 14. The sergeant looked the other way and Bob was in.

By January 1944 he had sailed through the parachute training school. “He loved being a paratrooper,” his commanding officer, Jack Watson, was to recall after the war. “He was a very big chap and very capable. He was always ready to help people and really was fearless.”

He jumped into Normandy not long after the clock had hurried past midnight on 6 June to signal the beginning of D-day. Bob and his company were to spend 11 days on the frontline around Ranville and after a brief break were back in action in the bloody battle for Normandy. Some veterans have described this as the time of their lives, and from what we know of Bob this does sound like the time of his young life.

Back home, that was not how his parents saw it. When he’d disappeared, they searched with mounting desperation for their son. Not a single friend knew where he’d gone, or if they did they didn’t let on. The local recruitment office said they’d not seen him (he must have joined up away from Portsmouth). Henry and Daisy filled an ‘Under-age enlistment’ form and waited for the army to send him home to his mum and dad. Except this was not a priority within the armed forces – there was a war on.

At last, the Military Police picked up his trail. He was tracked down to his unit, the 13th (South Lancs) battalion of the Parachute regiment. Two MPs were dispatched across the Channel to find Bob – he was two young to fight. He should not be in Normandy.

On 23 July 1944, Bob was two days from turning 17. He’d no idea the net was closing in on him. He had a war to fight, a war he’d been fighting for six weeks. His platoon was dug in at the Le Mesnil crossroads. At 10am firing broke out. This is how his battalion’s war diary recorded what happened.

“At 1140hrs an OR [other rank] of the Anti-Rank Platoon was shot dead by a sniper from the area 146725. In retaliation we attacked [the sniper’s position] with mortars and PIATs at 1400hrs.”

That was it – the OR was Bob Johns, shot dead by a German sniper. Coincidentally, I read of the death of my great uncle Ronnie in the First World War in the same way; a brief sentence in a war diary that ends with him being shot by a sniper.

A few days later the two MPs arrived in Normandy with orders to take Bob Johns home to his mum and dad. They were too late. Instead of their son Harry and Daisy received a telegram… their boy Bob was dead for king and country, aged 16.

Robin Scott-Elliot has been a sports journalist for 25 years with the BBC, ITV, the Sunday Times, the Independent and the ‘i’, covering every sport you can think of and a few you probably can’t. He threw that all away to move home to Scotland and chase his dream of writing books instead of football reports. Once there his daughters persuaded him to write a story for them and that is how his career as a children's author began. Finding Treasure Island is his latest book and is published by Cranachan.

Children At War by Vanessa Harbour

With history we often talk about silent voices – those who have no voice and who had no chance to tell their story. Children could be perceived like that. The period I am passionate about is the Second World War and children play quite a role in it. Many of those roles were all about humanity and freedom.

The reason I am interested in the Second World War is because I was brought up on stories about it. My parents were teenagers at the beginning of the war. My father lied about his age so he could join up early. He drove tanks initially before becoming an officer in the Parachute Regiment.

My mother joined the WRNS and led quite a life, which she loved telling me about.

The perception of children in the UK during the Second World War was that they were evacuated. And yes, over a million children were evacuated with their schools from towns and cities to the safety of the countryside. Most went by train and were settled with foster parents. For some who’d never been outside their cities it was an adventure; for others they were desperately homesick. It was hard to adjust to being separated from family and friends. One of my favourite books about evacuees is Good Night Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian.

However, for those who stayed in the cities things might have been very different. During the Battle of Britain, they might have watched the planes of the RAF and Luftwaffe in dog fights above them. During the Blitz itself, 7,736 children were killed and 7,622 were seriously wounded. The Blitz meant many children were orphaned or a sibling might have been killed during the bombing.

Their education was also disrupted as schools were damaged. Often, they might have to leave their classrooms when there were air raids. Many children pulled their weight. During the war, children left school at the age of fourteen and would be in full-time work, maybe agriculture, offices or major industries. Those over sixteen, including Girl Guides and Scouts assisted with Air Raid Precautions during an air raid. They’d take messages, be fire watchers or work with the voluntary services. Boys received their call up papers at eighteen, and soon girls were also conscripted, so would receive call up papers too. Check out Phil Earle’s book, When the Sky Falls. It deals with a lot of the issues that children had to face.

It wasn’t just the teenagers; younger children did their bit too. They’d salvage scrap metal, paper, glass and waste food for recycling. Also ‘digging for victory’. They still got a chance to be children though. They might have homemade toys. Books and comics were very popular. Children would happily play on bombsites and sometimes go to the cinema.

Children in Britain at least did not have to face the threat of persecution – unlike those in Europe. In both my books, Flight and Safe, the main characters Jakob and Kizzy constantly face the threat of persecution as one is a Jew and the other has a Romani background. In Safe, I also introduced the idea of 'Lost Children’ or Found Children as I called them. These were children that moved around Europe in packs at the end of the Second World War having lost all their relatives so they only had each other. Can you imagine how resourceful they had to be to keep themselves safe and alive?

Nazis had a tendency to pick on children. They would target them for racial reasons, or because they looked disabled, or if they had a suspicion they were linked to political activities/the Resistance. 1.5 million Jewish children were murdered by the Nazis – thousands of Jewish children were saved by being hidden away. The Nazis also murdered tens of thousands of Romani children, and 5000-7000 physically and/or mentally disabled children were also murdered. The Nazis were very cruel - this was all driven by Hitler’s desire to have a ‘perfect race’.

This is a child’s shoe found at Auschwitz, displayed at Peace Museum, Caen, France.

As well as the concentration camps, Nazis created ghettos. Within the ghettos, Nazis considered the younger children to be unproductive because they couldn’t work so were named ‘useless eaters.’ Children in ghettos often died of starvation, disease, lack of clothing and shelter. If you want to know more about this time, Morris Gleitzman’s Once and Ian Serraillier’s The Silver Sword are powerful books based on true stories.

Children didn’t accept their countries being invaded or their friends being humiliated. They stood up to the Nazis in their own way whether it was in France, Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, or Czechoslovakia. All over Europe children stood with their parents in the Resistance to fight the anti-Nazi cause. Some maybe wanted adventure, some were desperate.

The resistance might take a childish form such as burping in soldiers’ faces or singing patriotic songs. Sometimes they would co-ordinate coughing fits when they were supposed to be watching Nazi propaganda films.

Their innocence could be of benefit though. No one would question a little girl pushing her doll’s pram, not realizing there were books hidden inside, taken from school to stop them being burnt, or a message maybe, or even a gun. The children might be used to hide or escort a shot down pilot or escaped prisoners of war. The danger was constant. A sixteen-year-old girl, whose parents had died, successfully hid thirteen Jews in her house to keep them safe, while looking after her younger sister. Check out Tom Palmer’s book Resist which is based on Audrey Hepburn’s war time experiences, getting information and passing messages to the resistance, while living in the Netherlands.

I want to keep remembering how brave these children were and I know in many wars all over the world there are many children being equally as brave.

Bio

Vanessa Harbour is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Winchester. Previously she ran her own PR & Management consultancy. Also, she used to work as an editor and Academic and Business Consultant at the Golden Egg Academy, and now writes online courses. She’s written for The Bookseller on being a disabled author. Flight, Vanessa’s first novel, is a World War II middle-grade thriller selected for Empathy LabUK’s Read for Empathy Collection 2020. Safe is Jakob and Kizzy’s second adventure, set against the last days of the War, involving horses and this time some ‘lost children’.

Social Media

Twitter @VanessaHarbour Facebook https://www.facebook.com/VanessaHarbourAuthor Instagram @nessharbour Tik Tok @nessharbour YouTube: Channel: Vanessa Harbour https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMZcIV7Ql2bPE1YeZFRwAlw Bookseller: https://bookwagon.co.uk/

The Windermere Children: The story of 300 child Holocaust survivors who came to the Lake District

In 1945 the people of Lakeland welcomed three hundred child Holocaust Survivors into their community.

Lake Windermere

(photo Susan Brownrigg)

A special exhibition at Windermere Library From Auschwitz to Ambleside highlights what life was like for these children. I visited to find out more.

Windermere Library, home to the
Auschwitz to Ambleside exhibition 

(photo Susan Brownrigg)

In 1942 the Nazis began what they called ‘the Final Solution’ - a plan to exterminate all Jewish people across Europe. Roma gypsies, gay and disabled people, as well as black and mixed-race people were also persecuted and killed. 

It's estimated that eleven million people died in the Holocaust including six million Jewish people

By the end of World War II, approximately 90 per cent of Europe’s Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust.

In June 1945, Leonard Montefiore, of the Central British Fund (now World Jewish Relief), persuaded the British Government to give permission for a thousand Jewish orphans aged from eight to sixteen to be brought to the UK for recuperation, and ultimate re-emigration overseas. 

Leonard Montefiore also set up the
 Kindertransport (children’s transport)
 which provided refuge for
 10,000 children before the war.

Just 732 actually came to Britain. They became known as The Boys, though they included 204 girls. 

Of these, 300 children who had survived the Theresienstadt Ghetto in the Czech Republic were brought to Windermere. The youngest were just three years old. 

Many of the children no longer knew how old they were and could not remember their date of birth, and lots were older than sixteen.

The Lake District Holocaust Project which curated the exhibition explains: “The Jewish children who came to the Lake District had been liberated in May 1945. Many had been used as slave labour in many camps across Nazi Occupied Europe for a number of years. The list of names of the camps they had experienced is an A-Z of horror. Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Majdanek, Warsaw ghetto, Lodz ghetto…..they each had a different story to tell of a different journey. Their discovery in Theresienstadt does not begin to cover their story.”

The children were to spend a period of recuperation in the Lakes before setting out on new lives.  

The children were flown from Prague to Crosby on Eden airfield near Carlisle. 

The Immigration Officer said: “The behaviour of the children was exceptionally good.”

From there the children were taken in a convoy of buses and army trucks to Calgarth - a wartime housing estate built to accommodate workers from the Short Sunderland Flying Boats factory on the shores of Windermere. 

The single workers no longer needed the rooms at the now lost estate, near Troutbeck Bridge - and there was the perfect number available for each child to have their own private room.

A plan of the Calgarth Estate from Cumbria Archives
which is on display in the library

(photo Susan Brownrigg)

Arriving in the Lake District was described by the children as like being in “Paradise”.  

The Lake District Holocaust Project website explains: “The estate had its own shops, canteen, entertainment hall and many other facilities. They were each given their own small room, a bed and clean linen. For many it was their first encounter with privacy and cleanliness in five years.”

One quote on display is from Ben Helfgott, who was 15 when he came to Calgarth. “I'll never forget the smell of the fresh linen I slept on that first night ... I can't remember ever having a better night sleep ... It was only a hut, but to me it was a palace.”

The children who came to Windermere

were given a copy of Pears' Cyclopaedia

The children became known as the Windermere Boys - although the group included 35 girls.

Most young survivors were male and the Nazis considered girls less useful for slave labour.

When they arrived they could not speak English, so they were given language lessons.

The children were offered opportunities for sport, education, outdoor recreation and healthcare. 

Over a period of six months, they were gradually moved to other homes in places throughout the UK, and they had left Calgarth Estate by early 1946.

Around 30-40 children moved to Manchester, others to Liverpool, Gateshead and London. Some left Britain, to America, Canada and Israel.

Outside the library there is a memorial garden to the Windermere Children with colourful artwork and planting that tells the journey of the children through the language of flowers.

The interpretation explains: “Many of the children spoke of their love of the luscious green of the Lake District and described it as an explosion of colour after the horrors of the camps.”

Plants chosen include heather (protection) daffodils (new beginnings) and snowdrops (hope.)

From Auschwitz to Ambleside exhibition, Windermere Library

(photo Susan Brownrigg)

The children's story is also retold in the BBC film The Windermere Children and the accompanying documentary The Windermere Children: in their own words.

After the War from Auschwitz to Ambleside by Tom Palmer

The book After the War : From Auschwitz to Ambleside by Tom Palmer tells the story of the Windermere Boys in a dyslexia friendly accessible format. It is published by Barrington Stoke. The Centre for Holocaust education offers lesson plans for schools studying the book.

The '45 Aid Society was set up in 1963 by some of the 732 children who came to Britain in 1945. Their children continue the society's work. 

Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT) encourages remembrance in a world scarred by genocide. They promote and support Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) – the international day on 27 January to remember the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, and the millions of people killed under Nazi Persecution and in genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. 27 January marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp.

Useful links:

https://www.hmd.org.uk/take-part-in-holocaust-memorial-day/schools/primary-schools/

https://holocausteducation.org.uk/lessons/open-access/lesson-materials-to-support-after-the-war-a/

https://www.worldjewishrelief.org/about-us/the-boys

https://45aid.org/

Visiting history by guest author Tom Palmer

As well as looking at pictures and photographs, interviewing people, going to museums, watching films, YouTube, historical documentaries, reading book after book to do my research, I also like to go to the place where the book is set.

In the case of Resist that place is Velp.

Velp is small village that has become part of the city of Arnhem in the west of the Netherlands. It is calm and friendly, picturesque and lovely. There are a lot of people on bicycles and gardens with flowers and nice little shops and cafes. You wouldn’t think that one of the most dramatic battles of the Second World War took place on its streets, with ordinary people hiding in the cellars to avoid tanks and bombs and aeroplanes, smoke and fire and blasts and worse.

And, to be honest, it is very hard to imagine war when you visit Velp nearly eighty years later. For research purposes there might not seem much point. But – if you can – it really is worth visiting a place where you are setting a story.

I realised that when I arrived to find myself in Velp railway station.

I was here. In the village where the whole of my historical novel, Resist, is set. Metres from where the book starts at the level crossing where my main character is forced to stop and be searched by a German soldier.

How did I feel?

Thrilled. Excited. Giddy. But I’d learned absolutely nothing new. Not yet.

Not until I found the building that stands where my hero character used to live. Here was my first lesson.

There’s a statue of a girl in the middle of a garden of rosebushes half way up on the main road running north out of Velp.

The girl is in a ballet pose. She looks about fourteen. There is no sense that she was to become one of the most famous film stars who ever lived. But she did. This is a statue of Audrey Hepburn, star of Breakfast at Tiffany's and My Fair Lady.

Standing in front of her statue when I visited Velp was big for me. It reminded me that my book was about Audrey Hepburn, the girl. Resist ends when she is fifteen, looking as she looked in this statue. The statue is in front of the building that has been built where she lived with her mother and grandfather.

That was what the story should be about. A girl who lived in a warzone, who did astonishingly brave things to help frustrate the Nazi occupiers of her home village. A very scared girl who has lost family members in the war and fears she will lose more.

Not about one of the most famous women the world has ever known.

Next, I walked up the road to the edge of the village. I wanted to explore the woods. Probably the most dangerous thing Audrey Hepburn did during the war was to go into the woods, search for a shot down Allied airman and take him food and water and clothes so that he could escape to safety and not be caught by the Nazis.

The woods will look very different today. Perhaps all of the original trees have gone. The Dutch needed to cut down trees in the winter of 1944 to 1945 to burn because the Germans had taken all their coal and other fuels.

That struck me when I was sat in the woods. Imagine if you ran out of fuel this winter. I am sorry to say that many will. How cold would you have to be to go into the woods and chop branches off the trees to keep your family warm, to keep your family alive?

This revelation, for me, is what made me understand that it was good I visited Velp.

I spent hours walking the streets of Velp. From Audrey’s house to the woods. From the hospital where she volunteered to the village centre. From the station to other places she had been to. I imagined in my head that I was Audrey going here and there. How she’d feel. What she’d do. So that when it came to writing the book I had her village mapped out in my head. I had some new ideas from seeing her statue and the station and the woods.

And it taught me that, although the events that Resist is based on were eighty years ago and, although the buildings and trees could all be new and different, history and its echoes is still there if you take the trouble to walk the streets.

Watch Tom's Time Tunnellers YouTube video here

Tom Palmer

 

Tom Palmer is the author of 57 children’s books, mostly historical or sports based. He has won the FCBG Children’s Book Award and the Ruth Rendell Award for Services to Literacy and has been nominate for the Carnegie three times. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and daughter.

 WEB               www.tompalmer.co.uk

TWITTER       @tompalmerauthor

FACEBOOK    www.facebook.com/tompalmerauthor

“Any Old Iron” Guest post by Elizabeth Wein

The garden of my house in Perth, Scotland, lost its iron rail fence in World War II – not to an enemy bomb, but to patriotism. All over the United Kingdom, iron railings got chopped down in parks and gardens to support the war effort. Here's a link to a newsreel from 1940 showing men collecting railings in a London park!

https://www.britishpathe.com/video/park-railings-for-munitions

The idea was that the iron would be melted down and used to make ammunition and armour for tanks and ships, although nobody’s really sure if that happened – there’s a rumour that London’s iron railings were all dumped in the Thames, and I’ve been told that Perth’s ended up in landfill on St. Magdalene’s Hill.

Iron rail fences on our road early in the 20^th century

Parliament’s Hansard report for 13 July 1943 tells us that somebody wanted to know what was being done with all that collected iron. Lord Hemingford commented, “It has been felt that an injustice has been done to a very large number of usually uncomplaining and patriotic people. This question of the requisitioning of railings and gates is rather like eczema; it is not very serious, but it is most confoundedly irritating, and causes a vast amount of bad temper.”

(source: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1943/jul/13/requisitioned-railings)

For years, whenever I looked at the stumps of those railings in my garden wall, I thought of them as my house’s wartime scars. What I didn’t realize was that World War II took away something far more tragic from my house than its decorative iron railings. It took away the boy who’d come of age in that house and who’d still lived there when he went to war as a young man, the only child of the couple who lived in that house for forty years. He left my house to go to war and he never came back.

He was a navigator in the Royal Air Force. He was part of a team of “pathfinders,” a dangerous job in which an advance aircraft would have to find and mark an attack site for a bomber squadron, dropping flares in the dark that would light up the enemy target.  On 7 Dec. 1940, he and five other crew members took off from RAF Stradishall in Suffolk in their “Wimpey” – a twin-engined Vickers Wellington bomber. They flew through atrocious weather in the dark to Germany, along with two other pathfinder aircraft, to mark the target for a bombing raid in Dusseldorf. They vanished later that night somewhere over the North Sea – “Aircraft failed to return,” is what the official reports said.

A Wellington crew

(source: https://www.lancs.live/news/lancashire-news/lancaster-bomber-brave-daredevils-who-24064051)

Let me tell you about Chick. (His real name was Charles.) He was a mild-looking young man with dimple in his chin – his RAF portrait is in black and white, but I think he must have been like Kate, his mother, short and lightly built, with brown hair, those amused eyes blue. Robert, Chick’s adoptive father, ran a fishmonger’s shop in Perth, where Chick helped out, but in 1939, with war looming, he joined the Royal Air Force as a reservist.

The road in front of our house in 1934 and 2022

Late in August 1939, just before Germany invaded Poland, one of Chick’s mates who was also a reservist got his calling-up papers. The friend and a few others turned up at Chick’s house – MY house! – at eleven o’clock that night, and they all decided they’d have one last night on the town before they were called into action. Chick drove them from Perth to Dundee where, arriving after midnight, they had a couple of drinks and checked out a couple of all-night coffee stands before heading back to Perth at about three o’clock in the morning.

That’s when Chick ignored a stop sign, was spotted by a waiting policeman, and got pulled over for driving under the influence of alcohol – which apparently he didn’t have a very good head for!

He was fined £10 and given a six month driving ban. He was contrite and honest about what had happened, and solicitor who defended him pointed out that it was Chick’s “first time in trouble”! (Source: Dundee Evening Telegraph, 25 Aug. 1939, page 6).

See my source note there – I got this story from an old newspaper. It’s available online in the British Newspaper Archive. Actually, everything I know about Chick – the details of the colour of his mother’s hair and eyes, the kind of plane he flew, the date of his disappearance, even his nickname – I dug up by accident simply because I just wanted to know more about my own old house.

And in the wider sense, isn’t that the real reason we dig up history – because we want to know more about our own house, our own city, our own people, our own world? To learn from them, to connect to them in their strengths and to correct their weaknesses?

I tell this as a coherent story, as if I knew these people, Chick and his family and friends. But what I know about them I found through scraps, fragments, puzzle pieces that I’ve fit together: RAF war graves memorials, stories and police reports and personal columns in local newspapers, internet queries on ancestry chat boards, wartime bulletins, photographs, voting records, passenger lists for ships and airplanes.

(source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickers_Wellington#/media/File:See_How_Your_Salvage_Helps_a_Bomber_Art.IWMPST14695.jpg)

Look at that – the scrap metal from his own fence railings may have become part of the Wellington bomber that Chick died in.

All my stories begin this way – finding connections between the ordinary and the extraordinary, between daily life and drama, between the past and the present. I hope this gives you some inspiration for finding your own fascinating connections!

Elizabeth Wein is a recreational pilot and the owner of about a thousand maps; flight inspires her young adult novels and non-fiction. Her best-known book, Code Name Verity, was short-listed for the Carnegie award and became a number one New York Times bestseller in 2020. She has published three short novels with Barrington Stoke, including Firebird, which won the Historical Association's Young Quills Award for Historical Fiction in 2019. Look for her latest flight-inspired historical thriller, Stateless, published by Bloomsbury in March 2023.

Visit Elizabeth's website at https://www.elizabethwein.com/

Twitter: @ewein2412

Instagram: ewein2412

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein.

The link to my info on the Barrington Stoke site: 

Elizabeth's Barrington Stoke books

Elizabeth Wein: Bloomsbury Publishing (UK)

Bletchley Park special by guest author Alison Weatherby

Secrets. 

We all have them. Some are small – when you’ve eaten your little brother or sister’s sweets or bought a surprise for your mum’s upcoming birthday. Others are so big they involve tons of people and sit at the back of your mind always. When I was young, I blurted out my sister’s birthday gift casually, a coveted doll my mother had driven miles away to buy. I’ve always been lousy at secrets, especially when they’re juicy. Thankfully, most people know that and don’t ask me to keep them for very long.

But what if you had to keep a secret for decades, one that was so big, it involved secret codes and massive machines, life-saving decryptions and even spies? Could you do it? 

Bletchley Park

That was one of the first questions I had when I visited Bletchley Park, Britain’s headquarters for codebreaking during WW2. Workers from the Government Code and Cipher School moved to Bletchley before the war started with the primary goal of assembling a team to break the cipher the Germans were using to keep their radio communications secret. This cipher, called Enigma, had many variations and was considered “unbreakable.” Bletchley recruited some of the top minds -- including linguists and mathematicians, chess champions and historians, students from Oxford and Cambridge – to help break Enigma. But before any person could start work at Bletchley, they had to sign something called the Official Secrets Act.

The Official Secrets Act stated, essentially, that no one could tell anyone anything about what they did at Bletchley. This meant workers couldn’t tell their parents what they did all day, or chat with their co-workers about what they were doing over lunch in the canteen. And because no one knew what other people at Bletchley did, they never knew if their decrypts were successful or what part their work played in the war effort. Very few photographs were taken and, when Bletchley closed its doors after the war, buildings were left to ruin and records were destroyed. People still had to keep their lips sealed for decades after. In spite of this, the workers at Bletchley helped immensely with the war effort. It’s said that their efforts shortened WW2 by at least two years. 

 Decoded messages

But in spite of this great secret, the employees at Bletchley worked hard. Whether it was trying to figure out clues to the encoded messages, operating the loud, hot machines that helped decode messages, or archiving information to for future messages. Thankfully, the workers at Bletchley also had time off, where they were able to relax. They certainly had a lot of fun – putting on plays, cycling through the countryside, taking the train into London – because they needed the relief from their high-pressure jobs.

When I set out to write The Secrets Act (and yes, the title is inspired by the Official Secrets Act), I knew I wanted the book to focus on two things – friendship and secrets. I was fascinated by the idea of two friends working together, yet not able to tell each other anything about what they did or saw or heard. Most of the workers were women – 75% of wartime employees were young women – and they worked long hours, around the clock. And because Bletchley grew so quickly, the hastily constructed huts where they worked were draughty, cold, and damp, with heaters that often smelled or spat out smoke. I couldn’t imagine working in such a place and being alone and away from home for the first time, as it was for many of the girls. 

The radio used in the wireless listening stations.

I realized rather quickly, though, that if everyone obeyed the Official Secrets Act and kept mum about what they did, my story would be rather boring. That’s why I based my character, Pearl, on a real worker at Bletchley, the youngest employee at the Park. Pearl was based on a 14-year-old messenger who took memos and communications from office to office, hut to hut. And while I’m sure the real messenger at Bletchley didn’t spill any secrets, I knew Pearl would not be so careful. I needed her to hear and see things, to be unable to resist the eavesdropping so that she knew the bigger picture of what was happening at Bletchley. Ellen took shape from a few accounts of girls who had been recruited to the Park because of their academic achievements. 

 

The lake at Bletchley Park

Many girls were interviewed or given puzzles and quizzes before being asked to join the war effort, then sent to Bletchley with no idea what they’d be doing or what Bletchley was. Though I couldn’t imagine getting on a train to some unknown destination, girls like Ellen were excited by the opportunity to help their country through employment that was previously reserved for men.

But as I put all these characters together against the fascinating backdrop of Bletchley Park, I wondered, what secrets would I keep? What would you do if ordered to keep your entire life a secret? Would you tell? Even one person?

Alison grew up all over the USA as a child, moving to five different states before she was 13. Now she lives south of Dublin with her husband, two daughters and very naughty dog. Alison has worked in computers and technology her entire life, but has always loved writing stories for children, mostly because her favorite books are those she remembers from her childhood.

 

After being discovered in Chicken House’s Open Coop competition in 2020, The Secrets Act was published by Chicken House in January 2022. A historical mystery for teens, The Secrets Act follows two friends and workers at Bletchley Park during WW2, whose lives are turned upside down after a tragic incident that uncovers many dangerous secrets.

Instagram @alisonweatherbyauthor

twitter @aliwea

Find out more about Bletchley Park at https://bletchleypark.org.uk/