Patsy Trench took up writing books in her later years. To date she’s published three non fiction books about the early days of colonial Australia, based on her ancestors, five novels featuring women in the past misbehaving, and a collection of short stories about love in adversity. In a previous life she has been an actress, a scriptwriter, script editor, lyricist, a co-founder of The Children’s Musical Theatre of London, a teacher and a tour organiser.
"How Noel Coward made a surprise appearance in my novel."
It was my first historical novel, set in England in the 1920s – The Roaring Twenties as it became known. The central character, a woman in her fifties and a mother of three, named Claudia, was as a result of a chance encounter breaking out of the her reticent shell and discovering a rapidly-changing world around her. She was attending a party at the home of her eldest daughter, quite a challenge for a reserved lady like herself, surrounded by all these vibrant young things Charlestoning and ‘Black-Bottoming’ to the latest American music blasting from a brand new contraption called a gramophone. Then in the midst of all this there’s a sudden hush and in walks Noel Coward.
Coward, born in the last year of the nineteenth century, was in his early twenties at the time and was at the beginning of his career already beginning to make a name for himself as an actor, a performer and a playwright. His appearance – both at this party and in my book – came as a surprise to everyone, including the author.
On spotting Claudia, the only older woman in the room, he homed in on her and began to quiz her in a disarming yet decidedly intimate way. It appears he’d written a play – for which he was struggling to find a title – featuring a woman of a certain age who had fallen in love with a younger man, to the disgust of her drug-addicted son, and he (Coward, that is) wanted to know what someone like Claudia would make of it. Never having been in that situation herself Claudia did her best, and most useful of all, she suggested a title for the new work: ‘The Vortex’.
It was the only time she actually met Coward in the course of the book, although later, sitting in the waiting room in a railway station waiting for her train she spotted a man of roughly her age gazing in her direction rather mournfully, and reminded of the conversation she’d had with Noel Coward she began to fantasise a scenario in which the sad-looking man had just said a heart-wrenching goodbye for the last time to a woman he’d met right here in this waiting room, whom he loved passionately yet hopelessly, as neither of them could leave their respective spouses. She pondered on the title and came up with ‘Brief Encounter’ and made a mental note to pass it on to Coward if she ever saw him again.
All this was nonsense, of course, and I made it clear it was nonsense in a note in the book. Why Coward made his surprise appearance I have no idea, it really wasn’t planned. I just fancied the notion of including a real-life person into my fictional world, perhaps to give it a context, perhaps because before this I had been writing non fiction, about real people, perhaps because of all the people I could think of no one personified more precisely the image we all have of the Roaring Twenties than Noel Coward.
Having done it once I did it again with my other novels. Novel number 2 featured the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell, the founder of the suffragist movement Mrs Millicent Fawcett and several members of the Bloomsbury set, including in particular Lady Ottoline Morrell and John Maynard Keynes. Novels 3 and 4 featured my favourite character of all, the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree, the man who built Her (now His) Majesty’s Theatre in the Haymarket in London, who lit up the West End with his lavish, extraordinary productions of anything and everything from Shakespeare to extravaganza. An eccentric with a colourful private life, a generous, humorous, kind yet unpredictable man who disarmed and infuriated everyone he met. The original Professor Higgins in Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, later adapted into the musical My Fair Lady. Beerbohm Tree was simply irresistible.
The title of novel number four, Mrs Morphett’s Macaroons, about a play of the same name featuring a lady’s maid who becomes a suffragette, was a spoof on Mrs Millicent Fawcett (the lady in question was called Lady Phillicent Morphett: you can see how silly it all was).
Needless to say all these real characters were meticulously researched; that was part of the fun as I love researching. Delving into their lives was a useful and delightful way of immersing myself in the times in which they lived.
Maybe, now I come to think of it, I’m featuring these people because – fearful thought – they are more interesting than the ones I invent myself. Truth is stranger than fiction after all, if I had tried to invent a man like Beerbohm Tree no one would have believed me.
In the end, if I examine my sub conscious, what perhaps I’m really trying to do is introduce readers to people in the past who I happen to find particularly fascinating, to keep the memory of them alive, in my own small way. I’m not sure that was in my mind when they first walked into it but it’s there now. I’ve switched to non fiction for my current project, but in the back of my mind is the thought – who of these real people will I include in my next novel?
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B5NJSH8R
(Link to my 5-book series titled Modern Women Breaking the Mould)
Blog Host, Helena P. Schrader, is the author of
the Bridge to Tomorrow Trilogy.
The first two volumes are available now, the third Volume will be released later this year.
The first battle of the Cold War is about to begin....
Berlin 1948. In the ruins of
Hitler’s capital, former RAF officers, a woman pilot, and the victim of Russian
brutality form an air ambulance company. But the West is on a collision course
with Stalin’s aggression and Berlin is about to become a flashpoint. World War
Three is only a misstep away. Buy Now
Berlin is under siege. More than two million civilians must be supplied by air -- or surrender to Stalin's oppression.
USAF Captain J.B. Baronowsky and RAF Flight
Lieutenant Kit Moran once risked their lives to drop high explosives on Berlin.
They are about to deliver milk, flour and children’s shoes instead. Meanwhile,
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Based on historical events, award-winning and best-selling novelist Helena P. Schrader delivers an insightful, exciting and moving tale about how former enemies became friends in the face of Russian aggression — and how close the Berlin Airlift came to failing.
Winning a war with milk, coal and candy!
