I had been living in Hayes, Kent, for more than twenty years and used to commute daily on the Charing Cross line without ever having come across a mention of the Lewisham rail crash. It was only when researching the local history of the area in 2015 to see whether or not it might do as the setting for what I now thought of as the virgin birth novel that I came across a reference to it. This was the fly that stuck.
I have had to do some violence to history to unite these two strands. The facts of the rail crash are, as far as I can manage, accurate; the virgin birth story—apart from the seed described above and the medical tests detailed in The Lancet—is fiction. The characters, events and conversations are all mere invention. There is, I understand, a chapter about the case of Mrs. Emmimarie Jones in Like a Virgin: How Science Is Redesigning the Rules of Sex by Aarathi Prasad （London: Oneworld Publications, 2012）， but I didn’t dare to read it in case it contained something that derailed my plot.
All the household hints are taken from issues of the Hayes Parochial Magazine and the Hayes Herald, published between 1953 and 1959.
I did some enjoyable reading to steep myself in the flavors of a period that I am just too young to have lived through. The novels of the 1950s are too numerous and too well known to need listing here. Of the nonfiction, the most useful were:
The diarists of the mass observation project collected in Our Hidden Lives: The Everyday Diaries of a Forgotten Britain, 1945–1948, edited by Simon Garfield （London: Ebury Press, 2005）。
Family Britain 1951–1957, David Kynaston （London: Bloomsbury, 2009）。
For a frank and illuminating account of extramarital love and sex, long before such things were formally invented in 1963, I was glad to have found Diary of a Wartime Affair: The True Story of a Surprisingly Modern Romance by Doreen Bates （London: Viking, 2016）。
London: Portrait of a City 1950–1962 by Allan Hailstone （Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2014） provided photographic inspiration.
For the local history of the Hayes area I am indebted to Jean Wilson and Trevor Woodman’s Hayes: A History of a Kentish Village: Volume 2: 1914 to Modern Times （J. Wilson, 2012）。
Acknowledgments
When I was first published in my twenties, I used to think acknowledgments were a sign of weakness and I pitied those writers who seemed to need a whole village to raise their book. I feel rather differently about the matter now and ashamed that some extremely helpful people went unthanked.
In that spirit, I am indebted to the following: Judith Murray of Greene & Heaton, who is everything a writer could wish for in an agent; Federico Andornino, my editor at W&N—his suggestions have greatly improved the book and it has been no small pleasure working with him; Claire Pickering for thoughtful copyediting.
Thanks are also due to Ken and Sylvia Truss for their encyclopedic knowledge of the era and area in which the book is set, and very much overdue to Esther Whitby, my mentor for the past three decades.
Last in this list, but the first in importance, is my husband, Peter, for his unwavering support.
About the Author
CLARE CHAMBERS was born in southeast London in 1966. She studied English at Oxford and after graduating spent the year in New Zealand, where she wrote her first novel, Uncertain Terms, published when she was twenty-five. She has since written eight further novels, including Learning to Swim, which won the Romantic Novelists’ Association best novel award and was adapted as a Radio 4 play, and In a Good Light, which was long-listed for the Whitbread best novel prize.
Clare began her career as a secretary at the publisher André Deutsch, when legendary editor Diana Athill was still at the helm. They not only published her first novel, but made her type her own contract. In due course she went on to become an editor there herself, until leaving to raise a family and concentrate on her own writing. Some of the experiences of working for an eccentric, independent publisher in the pre-digital era found their way into her novel The Editor’s Wife.
She took up a post as Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Kent in September 2020. She lives with her husband in southeast London.
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