In the spring of 1913, an eighteen-year-old English housemaid called Kate met and fell in love with Franz, a twenty-two-year-old German waiter in Brighton. Within a year they, were married and soon had a baby boy, Richard. They had their whole lives before them. But when Britain declared war on Germany everything changed. Theirs became a future shaped by conflict, prejudice, and separation.

That housemaid was my grandmother, and her story has haunted me for a lifetime. She went on to raise a large family in England during the difficult 1920s and 30s, including a son, my late father. Finding out what happened to Kate, Franz and Richard gave me the motivation to research and write what has become a fictionalised account of her life story, The German’s Wife. The impulse for me like many memoirs or novels based on true life stories, began with a rumour about a disavowed son, a mysterious uncle that my father and his siblings never, ever talked about. Kate’s secret was hidden for two generations…why?

Many families contain hidden, unspoken stories that remain powerfully resonant down the generations, passed on by whisperings, awkward pauses in a conversation. In more intimate moments, typically in talk around photographs in a family album, scrapbooks or those kept in shoeboxes, we grow up recognising living and dead relations from a different, monochrome era. Family talk stitched together people, places and personalities, some of whom had passed on before we even came into the world. But there were absolutely no images of the secret, avuncular presence in my family.

Although I considered trying to do a ‘straight’ family history, the official documents and traces of Kate, Franz and Richard only yielded certain information and there were many cul-de-sacs. So, in the end, I made the bold step of deciding to take their story and fictionalise it. The novel, with its working title - The German’s Wife - doesn’t try to complete all the missing links in that complicated history. Instead, I’m trying to reimagine the

emotional strains and choices that Kate and Franz had to make in circumstances not of their choosing, reacting to the happenstance of history.