Author Sarah Hardy talks to us about her debut historical novel The Walled Garden and shares her plans for her next novel set in Suffolk after the First World War.
Sarah Hardy is a novelist based in Suffolk. The Walled Garden is Sarah's first historical novel. It is set in Suffolk in 1946 and is a story of love, the trauma of war and the miracle of human resilience. The Walled Garden is published by Manilla on 16 March and is also available on our catalogue.
There was a wonderful local library where I grew up in the London suburbs and during my school holidays I would simply steep myself in novels – especially the nineteenth century classics. So my heroes were Jane Austen, the Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy… Shutting myself away, I could become Anne Elliot, Margaret Hale, Dorothea Brooke and all of those extraordinary women falling in love – not always wisely – wanting to change the world and live passionate lives.
Working in magazines and newspapers didn’t really make me feel I had the “potential” to write a novel, instead it helped give me the professionalism to do so. Journalism was a great background for learning the discipline of facing that blank page, going to my desk every morning, especially those days when I don’t know what to say and outside the sun is shining and it’s so beautiful and beckoning and tempting.
I have always been fascinated by how people deal with extreme situations and after the Second World War Britain as a nation was suffering from what now we would call PTSD. Victory did not herald a magic new dawn of peace and prosperity. Instead there was austerity, secrets and silence. Everyone was scarred - not just those who had fought but their loved ones who had waited at home, only for men to return whose experiences had made them strangers. There was no help. You just had to get by, trying to reconstruct your broken life, your shattered relationships.
The story is set in 1946 in a Suffolk village and the big country house setting belies the damp and cold within, where a woman is trying to keep alive a marriage that has been violently ruptured amidst a community who are silently mourning all they have lost, as she fights to bring back the beauty of the walled garden.
Alice is certainly a composite character but the very first scene I wrote – when Alice has been out walking for hours and is reluctant to go home is based on how I often feel at the end of a walk – though not for reasons as sinister as Alice’s. I simply would rather be outside in the Suffolk beauty than going home to make dinner or do the laundry or some such boring chore. Also, Alice is dyslexic – as my father was. Thankfully, we have a much better understanding of dyslexia now but for someone of Alice’s generation it must have been so debilitating and humiliating. In one of the last conversations I had with my father I asked him to ask his doctor to call me and he had to ask me how to spell “daughter”. Heartbreaking…
I have always loved Dutch seventeenth century flower paintings – radiant blooms against the black background – and I’d hoped for something that could convey the possibility of light in the darkness. So I was delighted with the cover.
I’m working on a novel, also a tortured love story set in Suffolk with characters facing difficult moral dilemmas, exploring forgiveness in the aftermath of the First World War.
This is so difficult. But I’m choosing Winifred Holtby’s novel, South Riding, as it was a big influence in writing The Walled Garden. For me, what is wonderful about South Riding is how you feel compassion for all the flawed characters, and I wanted readers of The Walled Garden to feel similar compassion for mine and have a sense that they too would probably have acted in just the same way if they’d been born at that time, in those circumstances, facing those same dreadful dilemmas.
Ronald Blythe’s Next to Nature. When I first moved to Suffolk, more than 10 years ago now, I read his Akenfield. I remembered my grandmother loving it and I raced through her old copy from 1975. But I’m pacing myself with Next to Nature. It’s divided into the months of the year, and it’s so beautiful I’m only allowing myself to read the month we’re currently in. Blythe has that wonderful ability to take you “there” – be it in his garden cutting down the dead russet apple tree or watching the blazing sunset on Twelfth Night. Last night he mentioned Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond, one of my favourite novels. I’m more devoted than ever.
The beauty: I love to walk, especially in winter, or very early in the morning when often I don’t meet a soul. All that reading of the Brontës and Hardy only encouraged my longing for wild open spaces. So I set off at dawn down deserted paths, invariably heading towards the river or the sea as the austere contours of the fields reveal themselves, the moon frozen in a pale sky. I love the sound of the wind in the reeds, the buzzards circling high in the sky.
And although I’ve walked here for years now, every time it’s a new experience: the river, sometimes rough and swollen like flowing pewter, at other times a mirror reflecting these vast East Anglian skies. But always, whatever the weather, this beautiful, bleak landscape moves me and saddens me and uplifts me, and engages my imagination.
For years, I resisted pleas from my family for a dog. They were too much work, too much of a commitment – all the obvious reasons – and I was in no doubt that most of the work would fall to me. Yet, somehow, I have ended up with two Labradors, a black and a fox-red. To my surprise as I never saw myself as an “animal person” I’ve fallen in love with them. I’m so humbled by the sweetness of their natures it’s like living with two furry, smelly, dirty, perfect angels.
