? What is the book about
A. A woman who believed she was Benjamin Britten’s wife and invaded a performance of his opera, The Turn of The Screw, on the opening night of the eighth Aldeburgh Festival.
? Did this actually happen
A. Yes, in 1955, on 18 June to be exact
? What made you interested in this story
A. A year later an English woman turned up at my boarding school in New Zealand, and for a short time taught me the piano. She was also obsessed with Benjamin Britten, and when I discovered about the 1955 event I was gripped with a certainty that they were one and the same woman, and set out to prove it.
? Did you succeed
A. No. The Britten Pears Library confirmed the incident had taken place, adding that there were letters about the woman between Britten and his lawyer, but the trustees didn’t approve my request for access because they were held under the terms of a sealed bequest, and I was unable to establish any definitive link.
? So that was the Wall of Silence
A. Yes – so I decided to develop the story as a work of fiction, starting off with an assumption that they were the same woman, and going on to explore the possibility that Britten and his lawyer had been instrumental in getting her sent out to New Zealand, where she turned up at my school.
? Is this a coming of age book
A. In a way, yes: it looks at the impact of the woman on me as I was then – a rather dreamy 12-year-old girl, and depicts boarding school life in New Zealand in the mid 1950s.
? What happened to the woman
A. Well, I sort of betrayed her…she turned me into her obvious favourite, so to distance myself from this embarrassment I humiliated her in front of the whole class during a class singing lesson, and she left the school almost straightaway. I never found out, or even questioned, what happened to her until I read about the calamitous intervention at Aldeburgh and wondered if she was the same person.
? What makes you think she was a stalker
A. The Ronald Duncan biography of Britten. He was one of Britten’s librettists and writes how Britten contacted him several times about correspondence from this unknown woman, and again after the stage invasion. I researched stalking types, and decided she fitted the obsessive erotomanic type. I then constructed a history for her to frame the path to her obsession.
? The book is in two parts – what is part two about
A. I make up a future for her after she leaves the school, involving a series of picaresque cameos as she shakes off her obsession and acquires a new identity and confidence.
? It sounds so easy – what links the encounters
A. Each encounter plays a role in her gradual recovery; the incidents and the people she meets all have an impact on her, and by the end of the book she is an altered person. It could have been a misery ending, but I decided to make it a positive one. I think we need more happy endings in the world right now.
? What was the hardest part of the writing
A. The research: because the events happened more than 60 years ago it’s like writing an historical novel, but in a setting that many readers will remember, meaning alert readers can spot and challenge inaccuracies.
? How much of the book is fact, and how much is fiction
A. It’s a complete mixture - although I have tried to make it clear when I am making things up entirely. Overall the novel is a mix of memoir, autobiography, drama and invention, but I’m hoping readers will become so immersed that they will forget that the invented parts are just that – invented, and not real after all.
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