Australia | Denise Barnes

Hanging on the wall in my writing cabin are two old hand-painted prints, about 2 feet across, in their original black japanned frames. My grandparents bought them as souvenirs when they were on board the R.M.S.Orsova, a ship carrying the mail and twelve hundred sea-faring passengers and crew. The young engaged couple were bound for Australia. The year was 1913. One image is of the ship in stormy seas, the other in calm.

Since a child I’ve always loved these two pictures. When our parents would take us to visit Nana and Pop in their little terraced cottage in later years, my sister would fly through the front parlour to find them, but I would always hover in front of the two ship pictures, staring at them, imagining the people on board and wondering where they were going. It was only when I was about ten that Pop told me he and Nana had sailed on that ship all the way to Australia, and I would beg them for stories about the voyage and what happened when they got there. They eventually came home with two-year-old Harold (who was to become my father), after seven years because Nana pined for her sisters. At least that was what they told me at the time. The truth was very different. If only I’d written it all down, as I only remember bits and pieces of their lives in Melbourne.

But the pictures were enough to give me the idea and inspiration to write my first novel, using my grandparents’ decision to emigrate to Australia as a trigger point for my heroine, Annie. But almost everything in Annie’s Story is fictitious and does not follow my grandparents’ story. I don’t want Nana and Pop performing somersaults in their grave thinking the readers will get the wrong idea!

It was a moment of connection when Tracy Chevalier gave a talk at a Persephone lunch one day on her best-selling Girl with a Pearl Earring. Apparently Tracy had Vermeer’s print on her bedroom wall since she was nineteen, and one day she wondered what story lay behind the girl in the painting.

I believe that behind every novel lurks a real-life snippet that inspires the author to get that story written down. In fact, if authors made a point of telling their audience what inspired them to write their novel, I am sure some fascinating stories would emerge.

I’m talking about inspiration. Who or what inspired you to write your first novel? What was the moment when you knew you could do it and would do it? When you suddenly gained the confidence to tackle something so mammoth? When your life and family and job, even if one or more of those areas was in disharmony, still pointed the way that ‘this was the hour’ to make that decision and actually begin?

I’d wanted to write ‘a book’ since I was nine. By ‘book’ I meant fiction, such as the kind of adventures my idol, Enid Blyton, wrote about. I began by writing a serial and was the only pupil to have it pinned up on the class notice-board. I remember even to this day the thrill of seeing my story on display, and a group of children clustered round, avidly reading it. Then demanding to know when they would be able to read the next episode. Oh, the stress, even for a nine-year-old!

Adult life rolled along, and my writing consisted of dozens of short stories and articles and letters, together with some editing of a couple of charity magazines. But I was no nearer to my dream of writing a novel. And if I thought about it, I was beset with fear that I wasn’t clever enough.

But the dream kept nudging me. So I decided to go on a writing course. The only possibility in Tunbridge Wells at the time (ten years ago) was one morning a week at a script-writing course put on by the Adult Education Centre. I was disappointed it was script writing. ‘You’ll learn just as much, if not more, about novel writing on that one,’ said Richard, my published friend. So I took his advice. We started with a class of about 15 with Malcolm Davidson, our tutor. He had a wonderful wry sense of humour so I wasn’t surprised he had been on the US team writing the great American sit-com, The Golden Girls. He was an excellent teacher but even so, our class dwindled rapidly to a half a dozen.

At the end of the year I had a one-to-one with him and told him my secret dream of writing a novel. He asked me if I had An Idea. I told him I had two pictures of a ship called the Orsova hanging in my sitting room, which my grandparents had bought when they sailed to Australia in 1913, thinking they were going to emigrate. I told him I didn’t know many details of their journey or their seven-year time spent in Melbourne, but had enough of my own ideas to completely fictionalise it. Then I said I wanted to intersperse it with a present-day heroine who follows in her grandparents’ footsteps.

‘That’s a parallel timeline,’ he said.

‘Do you think I’m being too ambitious for a first novel?’ I asked.

‘No,’ was his answer. ‘If you get stuck on one story you can turn to the other. And I can see you’re excited by the idea, so that’s the one to go with. You can do it.’

So I did.