It’s one thing to discover facts about the historical period you’re writing about: could they make transatlantic telephone calls, what food was on the menu, when was Piccadilly Circus underground station built?
But how do you enter the mindset of the time? What were people thinking in 1920s London - how were they coping with the challenges of emerging from the cataclysm of the First World War and the tragedy of the Spanish Flu?
When I decided to write 1920s-set fiction, I thought I might understand some of that. We were recovering from the collective trauma of Covid, the lives lost, the shock of having our freedoms curtailed as never before in our lifetimes. The joy - but also anxiety - of re-entering the world of travel, parties, people.
On a writing course, I asked novelist Andrew Millar (who wrote Pure, one of my favourite historical novels, set in pre-revolutionary Paris) for his advice. Read letters, and diaries, and memoirs, he said. Immerse yourself in the language, rhythms of speech, attitudes and preoccupations.
So I did. There were the lively, bright letters of Dorothy L Sayers. The sometimes troubling letters and diary of Virginia Woolf. Vera Brittain, whose memoir Testament Of Youth chronicles the almost unbearable war years, as young Vera endures the loss of her fiancè, friends and brother in a relentless grind. Having fought her way to study at Oxford, she relinquished her place to do ‘something useful’ as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse in hospitals in London and France. The exhaustion and drudgery of those years is beautifully recounted.
But it was the post-War years that interested me most. Vera returned to Oxford, where she found her war-weariness and seriousness were not appreciated by the younger women undergraduates, who wanted to play tennis and drink cocoa and enjoy life. They were not, she discovered to her chagrin, interested in the experiences of their older colleagues.
This divergence – between the young men and women who had experienced war, and their younger siblings who had not – seemed interesting, and I tried to draw it out in Blackmail In Bloomsbury.
Janet Aitken Kidd recounted the dizzy whirl of 1920s ‘Bright Young Things’ in her memoir, The Beaverbrook Girl. Janet, daughter of the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook, was welcome everywhere. As she wrote of 1923 London: ‘‘We danced, and we danced, as if stopping would make us suddenly grow old and die. We would rush from one party to the next. We were all invited. We were ‘on the list’. A quick ‘Hello’ and we were on yet another dance floor, rotating wildly to the charleston or the black bottom.’
However, she claims, ‘We never behaved badly until supper. This was at midnight and wherever we were, it always ended in the traditional bun fight.’ She then describes her own ‘coming out’ ball, at which her father and Winston Churchill stood at either end of the supper table, ‘hurling cream cakes at each other, while bespattered guests, including Duke Ellington, joined in the fun’. Golly.
But I wasn’t just interested in the upper classes. Marjorie – a grammar school girl from a trade background – has a middle class friend at Cambridge University, where women were just beginning to be accepted for degree courses. And one of my best-loved characters, the tomboyish working class East Ender Frankie, had her origin in my discovery of Lily Parr, demon striker of the Dick, Parr Ladies football team of the war years.
Research tip
Read memoirs, autobiographies, published diaries and collections of letters – not only do they tell you what people were thinking about, but they’re great for helping you write dialogue that uses the cadences of the time, without coming across as distractingly archaic or anachronistic.
Favourite research moments
Discovering the story of the fabulous Lily Parr, munitions worker and footballer ‘with a kick like a mule’. Lily was one of the inspirations for a character who has become a favourite in my 1920s series, Frankie the garage mechanic and jiu-jitsu expert. Learn more about Lily here.
Reading about the midnight treasure hunts that Janet Aitken and her friends enjoyed in the 1920s, zooming around London at night to gather the doorman’s hat from the Kit Cat club, a knife and fork from the Embassy, gold leaf from the railings around Buckingham Palace… what a nuisance they must have made of themselves, and what fun it sounds!
Images: Janet Aitken as a debutante, Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, Lily Parr on the pitch.
Hooray for Frankie/ Lily and all the amazing real and imagined women whose stories you share with us. Lovely to read more about Marjorie's backstory!
This sounds great, Anna - and I hadn't heard of The Beaverbrook Girl! - very interesting point you make, about the rather manic (in every sense), compulsive dancing and food-fighting being a reaction to the national trauma of war. In her unpublished memoir Lettice Ramsey describes her studies at Cambridge (1918-21) being equally full of dances.