As I was finishing writing The
Olive Grove I realised I wanted to stay in Croatia for a second book. The
country continued to entrance me, and I was sure there would be many more
stories to tell — I just didn’t know what or where.
I have always been interested in World War Two and the era had
already inspired and informed two contemporary romances I’d written as Jane
Cable. Surely there was a little slice of Yugoslav history that would do the
same?
I started by reading about the difficult yet fascinating
relationship between Churchill and Tito, which proved useful historical
background, and I discovered that British troops had actually been based on a
speck of an island called Vis, the only place in the country not to be occupied
by the Germans. How could I find out more?
Hunting for research books I came across a second hand copy of the
intriguingly titled Island of Terrible
Friends by Bill Strutton. It was a fictionalised account of life on Vis
during the war from the point of view of one of the two army doctors based
there, Jim Rickett, and provided the sort of detail about life on the island an
author can only dream about. But where
was my story? I found it on page 66:
“As the British
soldiers stared, they saw that the group stood in a half circle around two
women, one of whom screeched and sobbed hysterically. The other, moaning,
gestured an appeal to the group. She was holding a spade.”
The horrific execution
that changes everything for my character Guy Barclay is real and although of
course most of the book is solely the product of my imagination, I have tried
to drop in a few little nuggets from my researches as well as being true to
major historical events, such as Tito’s presence on the island and the wartime
role of the commandos who fought alongside his partisans.
I was delighted to be able
to find a corner of WW2 that hadn’t been written about in British romantic
fiction and I hope you enjoy reading the book as much as I enjoyed writing it.
