Over the next few years 'The Epic', as it became known, grew and grew. I drew up a huge family tree, running from 1066 to the present day, which comprised about a dozen sheets of paper taped to make a long strip. Because of the constraints of space, everyone on it had to marry cousins. They also had outlandish names - I remember one set of twins called China and Cathay - and often lived to a vast age. I also drew a plan of the house, as like Rushbrooke as possible. My grandmother had a lovely old watercolour painting of the place, which now hangs in my mother's sitting room, and also a Victorian book about the house and its family, the Jermyns, so I had some material to help me.
Gradually, as I grew up, so the Epic grew up with me. The outlandish names disappeared and I did my best to weed out influences from other authors, so that my voice predominated. I studied the history of costume at art school, to help me with the Epic. My mother persuaded me to do a secretarial course because 'think how useful it'll be, to be able to type the Epic.' I got a temporary job as a mother's help in Oxford, so that I could research the Epic. When I decided to go to university, I specialised in seventeenth century history (although I didn't say anything about the Epic to my tutor!), and after I graduated I trained as a teacher because the long holidays would give me time to write the Epic.
This I did, re-writing all the chapters I had done in my teens and adding more, and more. By this time I was married, teaching a class of six-year-olds, and living in Tring, a small town in Hertfordshire. I wrote in longhand, and sent the book off in batches to my mother in Suffolk, asking for her comments. Once she had successfully deciphered my handwriting, she offered advice on practical matters (How long did journeys take? If someone had brown eyes in one chapter, and blue in another, which was right?) and also her more subjective opinions. Concerning an appealing child character, she said, 'If you kill Jasper off with a purple fever, I shall never forgive you!'
With my mother's encouragement, I began to think that the Epic might turn into a 'proper book'. I typed it out laboriously on my father-in-law's typewriter, a manual machine more than fifty years old, and began the search for a publisher. At the same time my marriage was breaking down, and when my husband and I parted, I went to live in a small bedsit in Watford, not the most beautiful of towns! Although the publishers who looked at the Epic (which I had christened 'The Moon in the Water') made encouraging noises, none was prepared to risk publishing such a large book by an unknown author. It was now 1980, and the country was in the grip of recession.14 March, 2006>
One of my mother's friends was an author who ran a bookshop near my parents' home in Suffolk, and he had contacts in the publishing world. He suggested I try to find an agent, and gave me a list of six. The first wasn't taking on new authors. The second said they'd be prepared to look at it. I took the six red ring-binders, containing over five hundred type-written pages, up to their office in London, left them with the receptionist, and went away on holiday. When I got back, my landlord said, 'Your publisher's been trying to get hold of you.' It was Vivienne Schuster, the agent who'd been passed the Epic. She was wonderfully enthusiastic about it and had high hopes of finding a publisher at last.
That was a momentous time, for I had also bought myself a small house in Watford. After moving in, I was living on a shoestring. One afternoon I was in the back garden, stripping paint off an old chest of drawers which a friend had given me, because I couldn't afford much in the way of furniture, and the phone rang. It was Vivienne, saying that the Epic had been accepted by Pan Books. I was going to be a real author at last!
Nothing in my writing career will ever beat that moment. I put on my favourite piece of music very loud, and hugged the dog. The advance, though not large, seemed an enormous sum compared to a teacher's salary, and the first thing I bought with it was a washing machine.
The rest, as the cliche says, is history. 'The Moon in the Water' and its two sequels, 'The Chains of Fate' and 'Alathea', were published in the UK and the USA with considerable success, and with the money they earned I was able to move to a bigger house in St. Albans, which is a lovely city full of history from the Romans onwards. I did find, though, that teaching all day and typing all night was very hard work, and realised that one of my jobs had to go. I gave up teaching in 1985 - not without some grief, because I did love doing it - and my best friends, Chris and Maureen Norris, kindly sent me a retirement card.
They had recently moved to Wiltshire, and when I went down to stay with them, Maureen drove me round the countryside to see the sights. One day she said, 'I simply must show you this lovely house.' We turned down a narrow lane lined with trees, and at the end of it was Great Chalfield Manor, a glorious mediaeval house in soft grey-gold stone. It was February, so it was closed to the public, but there and then I fell in love, and resolved to come back and look at it in the summer. Of course, in May, surrounded by its wonderful gardens, it was even more lovely. When I read in the guidebook that it had been garrisoned during the Civil War, and had suffered a siege, I knew right away that I had found the subject for my next book.
I did some preliminary research into Great Chalfield's history, and soon found that the owner of the house during the Civil War had been an elderly widow, whereas I wanted to write about a family. So I used a novelist's licence and picked Chalfield up and set it down in a Somerset village called Norton St. Philip. I had first been there several years previously, when a member of a re-enactment group, the English Civil War Society. We had performed a 'battle' at Longleat House, not far away, and in the evening someone had suggested visiting 'this really great old pub'. So we all turned up at the George in Norton St. Philip, in costume, and occupied the main bar, singing Cavalier drinking songs and banging our tankards on the table. There was a group of American tourists in the corner, who obviously couldn't believe their luck - or perhaps they thought this was put on every night!
So I had happy memories of the George, and the village itself is a worthy setting for the magnificent mediaeval pub. I began my detailed research, and had a real stroke of luck - I discovered that there had been a comprehensive survey of Philip's Norton (as it was known in the 17th century) done in 1637. Using this, I was able to produce a map of the village and a list of its inhabitants: how old they were, where they lived, what they did. Many of them would appear in the book as servants at Wintercombe, and although of course after 300 years it was impossible to recreate their personalities, the character of Bessie Lyteman, the promiscuous dairymaid, does have some basis in fact: she produced an illegitimate child in 1645 and then, just to prove it wasn't an accident, another one a few years later!
I had so much material on Norton St. Philip that I couldn't leave it at just one book, and besides, I liked my characters so much I didn't want to let them go. In the end I produced four novels about Wintercombe and the St. Barbe family, spanning more than forty years. Then I decided that I wanted a change: although I enjoyed the research, I found having to stop so often to check facts or events frustrating when I was in the swing of writing the story. So for my next project, I embarked on a fantasy trilogy, based on the imaginary world I had created at the back of a boring class in college, more than twenty years previously. It was great fun inventing names and countries and drawing detailed maps of my world, and even though I did do a little research, mainly into ancient religions and lifestyles, it was mainly to gather ideas.
By the time the trilogy was finished, I was married to Steve, whom I had met in St. Albans, and we had two small sons. We now lived in a village in Wiltshire, and I used my experiences of country life in my next two books, light-hearted modern novels which were published under the pseudonym of 'Alice Marlow' - Alice is my third name, and Marlow was also used as a pen-name by my great-uncle Louis Wilkinson, who was a friend of the Powys brothers and wrote literary novels sixty-odd years ago. I enjoyed writing 'Mermaid's Ground' and 'No Love Lost', but the pull of history was too strong to be denied, and I am now working on a novel set in London, Bath and Bristol during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715. After that, I have long-cherished plans to write a book about Alfred the Great, whose greatest victory against the Danes was fought within sight of our house. If, of course, I can fit it in between looking after the children, dogs and cats (not to mention my husband!), having coffee and cake with my friends, gardening, walking, taking photographs, pottery, reading and all the myriad other things I do with my time!
Pamela Belle