Biography

I was born in Salisbury, in the south-west of England. When i was five, my family moved house. Our new home in the Hampshire countryside had once been a gamekeeper’s cottage. It stood on the edge of a wood; there were no neighbouring houses, no street lighting and few cars came along the road. Our water was drawn from a well be a hand-pump and our electricity came from a private line and frequently failed - once, memorably, on Christmas Day. Behind our house were acres of woodlandwhich my brothers and sister and I explored, climbing trees and making dens, wary of the wasps’ nests that grumbled in fallen logs and the adders that coiled sleeping in the sun. Rare flowers grew beneath the dark canopy of the beeches and oaks and wild strawberries smothered the open ground.

Not far from the wood was a large Georgian house, which at that time was used as a furniture depository. We played in the overgrown garden and explored the gloomy passageways that tunnelled beneath the house, where bats roosted in the crumbling mortar. The landscape of my childhood still seeps into my novels – it is there in the beauty and isolation of the countryside and in the deserted, dilapidated houses and their gardens that have gone to seed.When I was fifteen, we moved back to Salisbury. I found it hard to settle in the city; I was unaccustomed to neighbours, to rows of houses. I began to long to escape. A few years later I left home for the University of Lancaster. There, at my twenty-first birthday party, I met my husband, Iain, a physicist from Glasgow. We married a year later, eventually settling in Cambridgeshire. The countryside here is one of big skies and open fields and brooding fens – very different to the rolling hills and woodlands of my childhood.By this time we had three sons. When our youngest was almost three I began to write my first novel. I had always enjoyed historical novels for the way they transport you to another time. My first four novels were set in the 16th/17th century. I found inspiration in place – the Anglo-Scots borderland for TILL THE DAY GOES DOWN, the Loire Valley for THE ITALIAN GARDEN.THE SECRET YEARS was the first of my twentieth century novels. Its successor, THE WINTER HOUSE, was a bestseller in both Britain and Germany. The first half of the twentieth century, with its world wars and vast movements of displaced peoples, its changes in the status of women and huge shifts in the ownership of land and wealth, is a fascinating and challenging period to write about. The wider events of history shape my characters’ lives, forcing them to go down roads they would not have chosen, but at times giving them opportunities they would not otherwise have had.Though my novels are broadly characterised as romantic, I would say that I give at least as much attention to the relationships between parents and children, siblings and friends. I enjoy writing about the dynamics of the family, the alliances that are made, the love and loyalty that can co-exist with the desire to escape. I am interested in the way in which families unconsciously assign roles – the beautiful one, the talented one, the good, dull, taken-for-granted one. A common thread through my work is the search for self-realisation and fulfilment. My characters struggle to escape bonds – poverty, the past, the needs and demands of others.

 

Research in Berlin and Poland – Judith Lennox

I visited Berlin with my husband, Iain, in July 2007, before I began to write "The Heart of the Night". I wanted to see the city, to get an idea of its geography and atmosphere. I was, of course, aware that so much of Berlin had been destroyed in the war, but I hoped that with background reading I would be able to marry the imagined past with the reborn city. I was looking for settings to use in the novel - houses in which my characters might live, cafés that they might visit, backgrounds for various key scenes. We took trains to Charlottenberg and Grunewald, and also walked a great deal, visiting famous streets and squares I’d only read of before. We spent a morning in the Kunstgewerbemuseum, looking for the sort of artefacts Friedrich might have in his house in East Prussia. We walked in the Tiergarten, spent a day at the zoo, and saw the Hotel Adlon, where, just before the outbreak of the war, Miranda learns that she will not be able to travel to Paris, and Olivier.

The following summer we travelled to Poland to research the East Prussian section of the novel. Our guide, Marcin, drove us from Warsaw to the Masurian Lakes. Quite soon, we had left the outskirts of the capital and were heading through fields and woodland. It was a long journey, six hours or more, and by the time we reached our pension in Wegorzewo (formerly Angerberg), we were tired and hungry. The next day, we drove round the Masurian lakes, where I had set Friedrich’s house, Sommerfeld. One morning, we went to Gierloz, the site of Hitler’s wartime headquarters, the Wolf’s Lair. The ruined bunkers, their vast slabs of concrete at crazy angles, were gradually being consumed by the forest. It was a relief to leave Gierloz to visit the castle in Ketrzyn (Rastenburg). The next day, leaving the lakes, we drove north-west, not far from the border with Kaliningrad, through a landscape that seemed to take us back in time, reminding me of the southern English countryside where I lived when I was a child – that same remoteness, the same dense woodland and dilapidated houses. From Frombork, we drove west, round the Vistula Lagoon, and then out along the narrow strip of land that divides the lagoon from the Baltic. It was summer, and there were roses growing on the beach. In winter, it would be a bleak, windswept place.

When we visited Berlin, we travelled by train, taking the Eurostar from London to Brussels and then an overnight sleeper from Brussels to Berlin. We took the train from Gdansk back to Warsaw, because I wanted to see from the carriage window the great expanse of Poland that lies between the two cities. I didn’t realise until I had almost finished writing the novel how many of the key scenes take place at railway stations or on trains. Trains run through "The Heart of the Night" like dark threads, echoing the vast movements of peoples that took place during and after the Second World War. When Kay and Tom leave Berlin in 1937, they take the train, travelling much the same route as the one I took in our sleeper. Rowland proposes to Kay on a railway station platform, and when Miranda flees East Prussia in 1945, the train seems to offer her escape, but ends up leaving her stranded in the snow. And at the back of one’s mind, when one thinks of the war, there is always the dreadful rumble of those other trains, transporting the Jews to the concentration camps.