Clare thought of Cal sitting downstairs, watching over Mirren… and she realised that she had never asked what had made him follow her, down through the pines, down to the water’s edge…

 Between the lines

Discover the inspiration behind The Map Maker’s Promise

Imagination and experience

There is a question often asked of me and, I am sure, of many other writers… where do I get my ideas from? Which does sound a bit like I’d be choosing them from a shelf. It’s a difficult question to answer, certainly. But one way I can pin it down is to say that writing springs from a combination of inspiration and experience; observation and emotional connection. I don’t ‘get’ my ideas. I ‘receive’ them.

I have a rich imagination, I think we are safe to say. As a child I was fascinated with books and wanted to create my own. I fashioned little volumes from folded bits of paper and filled them with stories. As a teenager I bashed out the beginnings of novels on a manual typewriter, progressing, along with technology, through the harsh apprenticeship years of reject slips and ‘no-thank-yous’. Until I had my first novel published when I was… wait for it, in my early forties.

And for all that time I had, and still have, the instinctive drive to create. After all, to be a writer, you must write.

But, as for the stories and the people and their inner worlds that I conjure up, the scenarios and settings… they come together as threads of ideas, memories and daydreams, synchronising by chance. Something I pondered on in my childhood, or a scene I dreamt up ten years ago, may surface in what I’m writing now. The whole process for me is organic. It’s circular, not linear. But to try to explain it and put it into words seems to make ‘it’ lose its potency. Believe me, if I could bottle it, I would.

The Map Maker’s Promise, like everything I write, was a long time in the making. I had tinkered with a novel set in Scotland during WW2 back in 2018. But then I wrote a different one! (The Officer’s Wife). However, the characters in that embryonic ‘Scottish book’ remerged, along with the desire to write about the London suburbs and the BBC during the Blitz. And when the story of Hillside, the secret map-making headquarters in the Chilterns, crossed my path, there was no stopping me.

These factual settings are the nuts and bolts of the story. But the symbolic themes did not surface until long after I’d spent a midsummer in the Highlands. Walking down through the steep pinewoods beside the cascading Falls of Foyers certainly inspired me, as did standing on the shingle shore of Loch Ness, enchanted by its silent mystery, its unfathomable presence. Both these scenes appear in The Map Maker’s Promise. But a simple glance out of the car window, while being driven along the top road between Inverness and Fort Augustus, offered me even more of a lasting impression.

Travelling over the moorland high above the Great Glen, I watched little lochans appear in the heath, reflecting the clouds in their waters, and the odd wee but n’ ben house merging with the landscape, the muir unrolling like a bolt of cloth. And I saw the deer, out of nowhere, running by the verge. The deer stopped. We stopped. And I will let my character Mirren take it from here:

She stared into wide, glossy animal eyes, as if she had snared the creature, caught it in her trap. Stretch out her hand and she’d feel the antlers, fierce and velvety. If she touched the deer, then she’d know the deer, and it might not forget her. She wound down the window but the sound of it startled the animal. It darted off, disappearing as if it had been an apparition, back into the bracken, as if it had never been.

Catching sight of the deer, the ‘happy accident’ if you will, delighted me, and stayed with me. But I didn’t realise its significance, and the way I could use it as a tender and enduring theme in The Map Maker’s Promise until I started to write the book.

I don’t go looking for ideas and inspiration… I didn’t go looking for the deer.