The Story Behind The Sketchbook
Every novel begins somewhere. Sometimes with a character, sometimes with a place, an image or a question that refuses to go away.
The Sketchbook began with several of these things at once. It began with Cornwall, with an old house that no longer exists, with a young artist, with a courageous woman who lived through the First World War and with the strange feeling that the past is never quite as far away as we imagine.
It also began with a puzzle and, as I wrote the novel, I often felt as though I were following a trail rather than inventing one. A house led me to a family, a family to a painting and a painting to a forgotten corner of history. There were times when the pieces fitted together so neatly that I wondered whether the book had been waiting for me to find it.
That's one of the great pleasures of writing historical fiction. Research gives you the facts, but imagination lets you step into the spaces between them. The Sketchbook grew in those spaces.
Cornwall is everywhere in this novel, although not always under its own name. I have lived here for many years and the landscape has become part of the way I think and write. A river I know becomes another river on the page. A house I have visited stays somewhere in my mind until it reappears, altered and renamed, as somebody else's home. A farm, a church, an old track or a glimpse of water through trees can all find their way into a story because I know how they feel.
Trevellyn House grew from several Cornish great houses, but its deepest roots are in Carclew and Lanhydrock. Carclew, once a magnificent house near Falmouth, was destroyed by fire in 1934. Its surviving shell still haunts the landscape and I found the idea of a vanished house irresistible. A great house may disappear, yet traces of it remain in photographs, plans, gateposts and family stories.
Lanhydrock gave me something different. Its grand rooms are beautiful, but I have always been fascinated by the life behind them: the corridors, servants' rooms, kitchens and staircases as well as all the machinery required to keep a great house running. Trevellyn is not Carclew or Lanhydrock, but both helped me understand what such a house might demand of the people who belonged to it.
The River Fowey became the St Wyllow River, reshaped to suit the story but still tidal, secretive and constantly changing. At high water it seems broad and generous. At low tide it reveals mud, stones and hidden channels, making it the perfect river for a novel concerned with what lies beneath the surface.
Heartsease Farm belongs to this same transformed landscape. It is fictional, but I placed it in the country around St Cadix, above Penpoll Creek, one of the quiet tidal arms of the Fowey. The real St Cadix, with its old house, farmland, woods and water, has a wonderful sense of seclusion. Heartsease grew from that atmosphere rather than from any single building. I borrowed the folds of the land, the nearness of the creek and the feeling of a place that has watched generations come and go, then changed the geography and history until the farm belonged completely to the Penroses.
The map is invented, but the weather, the light and the sense of the past pressing close are real.
The History Behind the Story
One of the most extraordinary discoveries I made while researching the novel was finding out about the extraordinary Princess Marie de Croÿ. I came across her while reading about Allied soldiers trapped behind enemy lines during the First World War. I was waiting for an operation at the time and reading a book I had stumbled across. Her story chimed immediately with an idea that had already begun to form.
Princess Marie was living at her family's château at Bellignies in northern France when the region was occupied by the German army. She became involved in helping stranded Allied soldiers and was part of the brave network that included the British nurse Edith Cavell and many less famous people who provided shelter, false papers and routes to safety.
What interested me was not simply the danger, but the courage required to live with it day after day. History can make such people seem certain of themselves, as though they always knew what to do, but in reality they must have been frightened, exhausted and aware that one careless word might endanger everybody around them. Marie is not a character in The Sketchbook, but her courage opened a door into the story and inspired a huge part of the narrative. Imagination took me through that door.
Harry Maxwell-Hart, the young artist at the centre of the historical story, led me to Charles Masterman and Wellington House, the secret organisation established in 1914 to shape opinion about the war. Masterman drew writers and intellectuals into the government's work and, as the conflict continued, visual art became an important part of the way it was recorded and presented.
Masterman was real and Wellington House was real. Harry was not. His part in that world is imagined, growing from the tension between art as truth, art as evidence and art as persuasion.
What A Sketchbook Remembers
A sketchbook is private in a way that a finished painting is not. It catches the first thought, the unguarded face or the view glimpsed from a train before the artist has decided what any of it means. It can travel more easily than a painting, survive by accident and preserve moments whose importance only becomes clear much later. It is both an artist's working space and a record of a life.
I've always loved the clues left by ordinary things. Letters, photographs, inscriptions and pictures can outlive the people who made them, but they don't necessarily tell us the truth in a straightforward way. They offer fragments and we bring our own hopes and assumptions to them. Sometimes we see only what we expect to see.
Art runs through The Sketchbook, but I didn't want it to feel decorative. Paintings are objects of beauty, yet they are also possessions. They can be inherited, sold, hidden, misidentified and argued over. Their value changes according to who painted them, who owned them and what can be proved about their history.
I became fascinated by provenance, lost collections and pictures rediscovered in unlikely places. A painting may preserve a face after everybody who knew that person has gone. It may reveal affection, jealousy or power, but it may also conceal as much as it shows.
At the heart of the novel lies the question that haunted me throughout the writing: can a work of art remember what a family has forgotten?
Cornwall, Fate and the Past
Cornwall's rich in stories of curses, omens, second sight and things that can't be neatly explained. I've always been interested in the point where folklore and legend meet family history. Some of the characters in this novel see patterns and warnings everywhere, while others believe a curse is simply a story repeated so often that people begin to shape their lives around it.
I didn't want to provide an answer. Coincidence may be coincidence or it might feel like fate when we look backwards and join the dots. The reader must decide where belief ends and imagination begins. That's the joy of literature - it asks us to explore and question.
The Sketchbook is my most ambitious novel. It's a story of art, love, loss and the traces people leave behind in houses, in the land and in one another. Although it returns to the world of Rosecraddick and readers of The Letter may recognise places and names, it stands entirely alone.
Cornwall was always the only place this story could belong.