Historical fiction author Vicki Beeby talks to us about her latest wartime romance A Wedding for the Bomber Girls and the time she was licensed to drive HGVs in Botswana.
Vicki Beeby writes historical fiction about the friendships and loves of service women brought together by the Second World War. Suffolk readers will already be familiar with her series about the Wrens, The Ops room girls and the Bomber command series. Vicki's latest book is A Wedding for the Bomber Girls which is published by Canelo on 25th April. You can find all of Vicki's books on our catalogue.
Is it wrong that all my heroes and heroines were fictional? I devoured books from a young age and particularly loved adventure books by authors like Enid Blyton and Willard Price, and when I’d finished all my books, I moved onto my brother’s Biggles books. So my earliest heroes were the characters from those stories, although I remember being frustrated that not many were girls.
I’ve always loved writing stories, and my earliest ambition was to be an author. Then real life got in the way, and I found that I also loved maths, science and engineering, and got sidetracked into various careers related to that. However, all the time I kept a diary and continued to write purely for my own enjoyment. Then in the 2000s it became possible to publish fiction and fanfiction on the internet, and that’s when I finally plucked up the courage to post some of my own work. I was encouraged by the response and that’s when I resurrected my old dream of being a published author. It still took a long time but I got there in the end!
I love fiction set in medieval times, especially the Anarchy, but the sad truth is that it doesn’t really sell (Or maybe it's just my books that didn't sell!) So as much as I enjoyed writing it, I knew that I would have to set my work in a different time period if I wanted to pay the bills. Then I visited the RAF Museum in Cosford and found myself bombarded by so many ideas that I knew I wanted to use the second world war as the setting of my next book. And that book became The Ops Room Girls and was what got me my agent and next publisher.
I usually have loads of ideas buzzing around my head and am often struck by a new idea when I least expect it. For example, I visited Orkney in 2019 to visit the Neolithic sites, and went with no intention of looking for book inspiration. But while I was there I found out about the women in the WRNS who served there during the war and a character idea popped into my head of a well-to-do young woman who joins the WRNS expecting to be posted to a bustling port like Portsmouth, only to end up in a remote signal station in Orkney. I was working on my first Ops Room Girls book at the time and so had to put that idea aside for a couple of years, but when my publisher asked if I had any thoughts for a new series, I had it ready to go. Research is hugely important, and I do a lot of reading around the subject, visiting museums, historical sites and archives. I also like to experience as much of what I write about as possible, so, for example, I taught myself Morse for my Wrens books. It’s important to me that my readers feel immersed in the story, so I try really hard to get all the little details right.
Not at all! I write heartwarming, romantic fiction yet at the same time I can’t ignore the brutal reality of war. I found it particularly difficult when starting my Bomber Command series, because the casualty rate among the bomber crews was shockingly high, and the odds were very much against their survival. Reading memoirs written by the women and men who worked in Bomber Command, I was fascinated by the ways different personalities handled the situation, and this gave me the inspiration for the heroine and hero of the first book in the series – The Girls of Bomber Command. The heroine, Pearl, is over-protective and risk-averse, yet falls for a pilot, Greg, who handles the stress by taking risks because it’s the only way he feels alive. Pearl’s struggle to decide if she can face the potential heartbreak becomes the central romantic arc of the story.
A Wedding for the Bomber Girls is the second in a series of four books set in a fictional Bomber Command station in Lincolnshire. The heroine, Thea, is something of a misfit and has to help her sister plan her wedding while being shunned by most of the women on the base. Then, just when she seems to have got her life back in order, a shadowy figure from her past returns and threatens to ruin not just her but her sister’s wedding. Your previous question asked about balancing the characters with the realities of war, and this is a case in point, because not only does the book feature the heroines having fun trying to find a wedding dress in wartime, but it also looks at the way aircrew suffering from stress were treated at a time when conditions such as PTSD weren’t even recognised. Juggling the light and dark elements in this story was a real challenge.
There are still two more books in the series to come – a Christmas book later this year and the final book out in spring 2025. I’ve already written the Christmas book and am awaiting edits and have just started work on book four. I wish I could share the titles with you but I don’t have them yet.
I recently took a bit of a break and read a few sagas that I’d put off reading while I was writing. I was lucky enough to be sent a review copy of Kirsty Dougal’s Wartime on Sanctuary Lane about a young munitions worker’s attempts to set up a clinic for animals in London’s East End, and I thoroughly enjoyed that. I also loved Helen Yendall’s The Highland Girls on Guard, the second in a series about women working in the Women’s Timber Corps.
I moved to Ipswich in the 90s for my first teaching job. It’s the only time I’ve ever lived near the sea, and I fell in love with places like Nacton, Orford and Aldeburgh. I took up cycling to help me deal with the stress of work, and having such lovely countryside on the doorstep was a real bonus. Another great stress-buster for me is reading, and so I used to spend long hours in the library, borrowing stacks of books at a time. I actually lived around the corner from Rosehill library, so I would go there when I didn’t have the time to visit the one in the town centre. It was a tiny place, so I hope it’s still going. I think I finished all the books to my taste from there in the first month, then used it to order books from other libraries. I must have been responsible for an awful lot of books being transported around the county, but it was a real life-saver for me!
I’m licensed to drive HGVs in Botswana. I went to teach in Botswana in the late 90s and needed to get a driving licence. I’m sure everything’s computerised now, but back then the driving licences consisted of a folded piece of card with a stapled photo and details handwritten on one side and a table of all the categories of vehicle on the other. The man issuing the licence was supposed to put a stamp next to the ‘car’ entry and another for the ‘motorcycle’ one but he got distracted and stamped ‘car’ and ‘HGV’. I hasten to add that I never exercised my right to drive HGVs but I always fancied having a go.
