Rose - researching the novel

There are few things more magical than finding that a place I’ve read and written about actually surpasses expectations - as the Crimea did. Even the weather helped my book – gloriously warm and sunny at the beginning of the week, so cold we could hardly stand up at the end.

We were therefore able to empathise with the hapless British army which landed in 1854 without sleeping bags or overcoats because the generals thought they should march unencumbered. (The army was drenched on the first night). And the Crimea is so layered with history we could hardly move without stumbling over something evocative and haunting. We saw Chekov’s dacha in Yalta, where he took ill with consumption (just like my ‘hero’ Henry – I like to think that a little of Chekov got into him after that), the Livadia Palace where the Yalta Conference took place after World War Two (it’s pretty rare you can stand in the same room as Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt), and where the Russian Royal Family used to stay before they were executed in 1917. We saw Greek and Roman ruins, and a Tartar palace. We saw where Russian submarines had been hidden during the Cold War, and the dreadful damage done by successive armies, including the Nazis.

So the Crimea was a haunted landscape, nowhere more so than Inkerman, where we visited the war cemeteries and heard our guide explain the folly of both armies who fought a battle in fog and rain, in wild, hilly territory, without even a map to guide them.

All this is in the book, though not always explicitly. When Mariella, complete with crinoline, sets foot in Balaklava, I could see with my mind’s eye the cramped enclosure of deep water, the cluster of run-down buildings, the hospital high up on the cliff-side. And when she views the city of Sebastopol through a telescope, I could see it with her, and imagine the Russian bastions bristling with guns.

For me writing about a war was a bold step because I’ve never witnessed fighting at first hand. So I conjured up someone even more inexperienced than myself (Mariella Lingwood), faced her with that alien landscape and a longing to find her cousin Rosa, and then allowed Mariella and my visit to the Crimea to do the rest.

I started writing The Rose of Sebastopol by imagining the confusion of a Victorian Miss – Mariella Lingwood - suddenly confronted by an impossible challenge: the man she loves is dying and, worse, seems to have fallen in love with her cousin, the infuriating, indomitable Rosa. The only way Mariella can establish the truth about these two adored people is to travel to the Crimea, to the heart of a war, where cousin Rosa has gone to work as a nurse.

In my novels, I try to avoid fictionalising real characters and events. Instead I use them as ‘anchors’ to my novels. Often they provide me with wonderful little plot devices. For instance, when Mariella finally sails into Balaklava Harbour, Florence Nightingale is on a yacht sailing out. There were many reasons why I didn’t want Mariella and Nightingale to meet – what fascinated me about my research into nursing in the Crimea was that although Nightingale played a significant part, numerous other powerful women were involved (some of whom had breathtaking clashes with Ms Nightingale). I therefore didn’t want the figure of Florence Nightingale to over-dominate the book. But the fact that Nightingale visited the war-zone itself in May 1855, fell sick of Crimean Fever, and then was sent back to Constantinople to convalesce – passing my Mariella Lingwood on the way - gave me a very precise moment in history for Mariella to disembark at Balaklava.