In the Springtime of the Year

Novelists are often asked if their work is autobiographical. The answer varies, of course, but I always say No. And then Yes.

In the Springtime of the Year is the nearest is have ever come to writing an autobiographical novel, in that if something in my life had not happened, the novel would never, could never, have been written.

The man I had been close to for eight years, when I was in my 20s, died suddenly and shockingly, a few weeks after I was 30. A close friend of us both told me that I should write about it – ‘not yet, but in a year`s time, you should begin.’ I took his advice to the letter, and went away again to the house by the sea in which I had been working on THE BIRD OF NIGHT when the news had come of David`s death.

The events and characters in the novel are wholly invented. The time is not the present and the death was very different. But the emotions were real. They were mine and I could never have written the book if I had not experienced them.

It is set in an unspecified past – but is probably somewhere between the end of the first World War, in 1918, and the beginning of the Second, in 1939.

The place, an English country village, in which the novel is set, is real. I began the book in Aldeburgh, but most of it was written in rural Buckinghamshire. I borrowed a cottage from friends who had gone off to Ireland, and described it, the garden, the countryside all around me, the animals and some of the people I saw, in detail. The cottage happened to be next door to John Mortimer`s house – that part of the country is very changed now and the village has become smart and part of the commuter-belt. Then, it was still a beautiful but ordinary working country village, with a shop and a school and a plain pub, working farms and farm animals.

The novel was written in a short time because I could not have borne it to go on any longer. I re-lived all the emotions I had first felt, and described intricately those I was still feeling after the death. It was painful writing in a way nothing else I have ever written except the autobiographical FAMILY, has been.

It was not intended as a manual for those who are grieving or those who counsel and care for them, but it has to a certain extent become one. It is recommended reading for clergy and bereavement counsellors – and because it is a novel not a textbook, it seems to speak to some people and give guidance to others. But I would never want it to be thought of as anything other than a work of the imagination, of fiction. A novel not a tract.