Charlie and C J Wray (The Excitements) discuss the WW2 women her book about fun-loving nonagenarians is based on and her views on modern and historical adoption as an adoptee herself. We also discuss the Peter Jones (John Lewis) department store, using Morse Code, and Diamond Doris, a jewel-thief who got away with quite a bit.

Please note there are a couple of mild swear words in this episode. Please also note we talk of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry which is commonly shortened to FANY.

Tickets to my live show of Friday 4th April can be bought here
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General references:
William Ernest Henley’s Invictus poem
Long Lost Family
The Yoga teacher Chris mentions is Dorothea Barron. It isn’t the same lady Charlie mentions, and unfortunately Charlie has been unable to find out who that was

Books mentioned by name or extensively:
C J Wray: The Excitements
C J Wray: Bad Influence
Christian Lamb (with Chris): Beyond The Sea, A Wren At War
Don Marquis: Archy and Mehitabel
Pam and Jean Owtram (with Chris): Codebreaking Sisters
Stella Knightley: The Girl Behind The Mask
Stella Knightley: The Girl Behind The Fan
Stella Knightley: The Girl Behind The Curtain
W E Fairbairn’s book: Hands Off! Self Defence For Women And Girls

Buy the books: UK || USA

Release details: Recorded 26th September 2024; published 10th March 2025

Where to find Chris online: Website (as C J Wray) || Website (Chrissie Manby) || Instagram

Where to find Charlie online: Twitter || Instagram || TikTok

Discussions

02:05 About Pat and Jean Owtram, the two sisters who inspired The Excitements
04:04 About the inspiration for Penny’s stealing, Diamond Doris
07:25 Using the Peter Jones department store
09:05 All about Archie
10:20 Toujours gai!
11:43 How Chris went about the writing itself
14:13 The Invictus poem and Fairbairn book
16:53 Chris’ use of Morse Code
19:16 Davinia and Sister Eugenia, and we then move on to Arlene
22:52 Chris talks about adoptions both historical and modern and her views on it as an adoptee herself
28:20 Did Chris consider having Penny and Josephine defeat the gunman?
29:03 Frank’s choice not to send Penny back to into the field
31:59 About Chris’ next book, Bad Influence
34:51 Chris once wrote a 90,000 page book in 2 months!

Transcript

Please note that this transcript has been edited for legibility and is not a 100% accurate representation of the audio. Filler words and many false sentence starts have been removed, and words have been added in square brackets for clarity.

Charlie: Hello and welcome to episode 117 of Author’s Afterword, formally known as The Worm Hole Podcast. On this podcast I talk to an author about one – occasionally more – of their books in detail. So, I’m Charlie Place and today I’m joined by C J Wray to talk about her novel The Excitements. Archie’s waited for his great aunts to join him in the restaurant of a department store but is called to a management office because Auntie Penny was found to be stealing – it must be her mind at this age, she’s let off. Penny and Josephine are in their late nineties; both served for their country in the Second World War, and Archie has some exciting news to share – the women have been invited to Paris to accept the Legion d’Honneur. This will happen. But these are ladies living for excitement and Penny’s slight of hand may not have been due to dementia. And Josephine has a secret that still haunts her. And, throughout the novel, we get stories from their times serving in the The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (for Penny) and the Wrens and stories otherwise (for Josephine). There is a lot more than meets the eye and no one should underestimate the elderly. Hello Chris!

Chris: Hello. What a lovely introduction. Thank you.

Charlie: Very, very much enjoyed your book; it is absolutely hilarious. And I love that you are bringing stories of older people who are really, like, yeah, in their 90s, to the page. And this book, I believe, was inspired by two sisters. Can you tell us about them?

Chris: It was; it was inspired by two real World War II veterans, Pat and Jean Owtram. And just prior to the pandemic, I helped them to write their memoir and was extremely inspired by their wartime service, but also by the women they’d become and just realised how vibrant and wonderful they were and what full lives they were living. And I wanted to bring some of that to the page in a fictional sense. Yeah.

Charlie: Can you tell us more about them?

Chris: Unfortunately, we lost Jean last year, but Jean was the model for Penny, who’s the younger sister of the two sisters in the novel. She was a member of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry and did all sorts of exciting things around code and cypher. So she was mostly decoding messages from Allied agents who were overseas. So she worked at Baker Street with the SOE, the Special Operations Executive who were famous for managing the spies on the continent. And then she went with them to Egypt and to Italy. So she inspired the character of Penny. While Pat, who was in the Wrens, inspired the character of Josephine in the book. But Josephine has a slightly different job in the book because she’s a plotting Wren, which was one of the Wrens who would take signals from Allied shipping and plot them onto a big map so that the navy knew where their ships were. Whereas Pat, actually worked in the Y Service, which was a listening service. She was a very talented linguist – she still is a very talented linguist, she can chat away in German, Norwegian, French, you name it – but she was posted around the country and listening stations, listening to the German navy and taking down their signals and then passing those to the admiralty. So she spent the whole war listening to the Germans. So she says it’s a strange situation to have heard World War II from the German side. Those were my two great inspirations, though I have to say right now, they did not get up to anything like as much trouble and naughtiness as the ladies in the book.

Charlie: I wondered if that was fictional, yes, yes! [Chris: Absolutely! And Charlie laughs] I do want to get onto that. So as you’ve mentioned it, I think I’ll bring it in here. Can you tell us about Penny, particularly, her stealing and its role and its use in the book and where it all came from?

Chris: That was inspired by a fabulous real life woman called Diamond Doris, Doris Payne. She was an American woman who started stealing jewellery when she was still a teenager. And it did start as it starts for Penny in the book, quite accidentally, her first steal and then she went on to become one of the most fabulous, notorious jewel thieves in the world. She was still at it well into her 80s and when she was around 75, she was put in prison for having stolen quite a significant diamond. And the judge said, “This poor woman, she’s getting on and I think we should release her”. So she was released three months into what should have been a five year sentence, something like that. And she went straight out and stole an even bigger diamond [both laugh]. So she was carrying on, well into her 80s and a film that was made of her life. But Diamond Doris is the woman to look for, the real life thief that inspired. There were many women working the same way. More recently in the UK, I forget her name, but a Romanian lady in her 60s, managed to steal a whole pouch full of diamonds worth hundreds of thousands of pounds from Boodles by bamboozling one of the assistants with her cleavage [Charlie laughs]. And she swapped this little sack of diamonds for a sack of pebbles. She swapped them over and left, went off with the diamonds and the Boodles staff opened this bag, it was just full of pebbles. And the diamonds were never found again. She did go to prison, but she’d pass them on to a third party. And so, yeah, she got away with it to a degree.

Charlie: Okay, was Doris, I mean, three months, I think you said, in prison. Was that her only stint in prison? That was it?

Chris: No, no, she did various stints in prison over the years. She was in prison in France for a while and managed to escape by claiming that she thought she had appendicitis. And so they took her to the hospital, and then she escaped from the hospital while she was in there awaiting examination. And then she had so many passports, she just skipped over at the border and was gone. But tremendous woman. And so, so glamorous. And you can’t help… I mean, we all know that theft is wrong and everybody pays, especially for shoplifting – ultimately, we all pay with prices go up, insurance goes up, that kind of thing – but you can’t help admiring the sheer guts and bravado of someone like Doris Payne and the Romanian lady who stole the diamonds and swapped them for pebbles. I mean [laughs] genius!

Charlie: I’m assuming neither of them sold for a good ethical reason as Penny? I suppose were did this part come in?

Chris: Because I wanted Penny to be, on one level, totally wicked, but on another level, for there to be a rationale so that we could all get behind her. And I felt that she, coming from a relatively wealthy family, wouldn’t really have needed to commit the crimes that she did. But she’s also a huge risk taker, which is how she ends up training to be a spy during World War II. She’s just absolutely out there. She’s so fearless and courageous and foolhardy in a way; she’s a thrill seeker. But I felt that she’d be a thrill seeker with a conscious, and she wouldn’t quite be able to keep all the money for herself.

Charlie: Okay, well, before I move on to further questions, I’m going to go to something because Peter Jones, you’ve got that as the starting point [Chris: yes], you’ve got that as an ending point, and you wrote your acknowledgments. I just want to ask, is there anything particular in choosing Peter Jones and using that in your work?

Chris: Well, Peter Jones – do you know Peter Jones? Have you ever been?

Charlie: I’ve actually been there once. I popped in, actually, a couple of months ago, so I know it a little bit!

Chris: So to anybody who’s listening who doesn’t know Peter Jones, it’s the flagship store of the John Lewis department store brand, and it’s on Sloane Square. I’m not sure why it has a different name to all the rest, but it’s called Peter Jones, and it’s been there for decades. And there’s something almost like a time machine to it that you go into it and you really do feel as if you’re entering, calmer, easier world. There’s something about it. I mean, Sir John Betjeman wrote a poem about Peter Jones and how nothing terrible could happen there. And there’s just an atmosphere of calm and atmosphere of… it’s almost like a Stepford department store [Charlie laughters], I don’t know what it is about it. But with my two great friends, Alexandra Potter and Lucy Dillon, both writers, we often meet there for tea. And it’s a real happy place, there’s a real atmosphere. And the cafe on the sixth floor, it’s got these great huge windows with a fantastic view over London. And the light’s always good up there. And so I quite often do go in there and sit and work. But there are only three plug sockets in the whole of the cafe. And if you don’t get there early, better I hope your laptop’s charged up. It’s competitive. A lot of writing goes on in Peter Jones. They should have a writing club.

Charlie: Okay, I’m gonna have to ask about Archie, because he is kind of the sidekick who’s definitely not the main character by any means. But can you tell us about Archie and creating him?

Chris: Archie is based on my lovely friend Simon Robinson, who works with all sorts of World War II veterans. And so I met him because of Pat and Jean in the beginning; he was looking after them, helping them do events, that kind of thing. And we just became firm friends. And during lockdown, we would be talking on the phone for hours at a time. And he’s just such a lovely, wonderful, gentle person. He’s only just turned 40, but it’s as if he’s from another time. He’s just got such elegance and such beautiful, beautiful manners, which aren’t all put on. He’s just such a kind person, and I often think, it’s almost as if he stepped out of a 1940s film. He’s wonderful. And I wanted something of that timelessness of Archie. Archie, he’s not made for modern life. He should have been born 80 years, earlier, when people had better manners and were kinder to one another! That’s what I think.

Charlie: I did take a while trying to work out how old Archie was, certainly, and then you put in certain bits that I was going, “Okay, no, he’s much younger than I thought”. I want to ask about the concept of, I hope I’m pronouncing it right, toujours gay?

Chris: Toujours gay. I pinched it. It’s a catchphrase. There’s these fabulous books written by someone called Don Marquis, which are, called the Archy and Mehitabel books. They’re sort of like prose poems. And Archy is a cockroach who aspires to be a journalist or beat poet, rather. And he types all his poems, but because he’s a cockroach, he can’t ever get uppercase letters or anything, so it’s all lowercase letters because it’s hard to type when you’re a cockroach [Charlie chuckles]. And his sidekick is Mehitabel who is this alley cat who believes that she’s the reincarnation of an Egyptian queen. And she basically lives in a dustbin, but she has all these airs and graces and her catch is ‘toujours gay’. So her life is life of an alley cat in a dustbin but she always puts on this brave face and this elegance and, “Oh, it’s toujours gay, Archy, toujours gay”. So I just thought that the sisters, they’d have read the books as children, that it just seemed like such a wonderful, wonderful phrase to bring through. It’s a philosophy; you have to put on your best face and best paw forward, pretend like everything’s wonderful, even if it isn’t.

Charlie: Yeah, no, it serves them well and it helps them keep going and stuff, doesn’t it? Gives them something to go for. You’ve got various forms of narrative her – you’ve got third person, you’ve got the letters, you’ve got the diary entries, you’ve got the past and the present and there’s lots of switching. Just want to ask you how you went about writing it and I think you’re a planner and, yeah.

Chris: Yeah, I’m definitely a planner, and this book took a lot of planning. I think it all started quite organically; it started off as a third person narrative, present day, and then the diary entry was straight into Penny’s voice, first person. I’ve been writing books for a very long time and have this fairly well-honed strategy now about plot and structure, but with this, I basically have got three timelines, so I had to plot it out three times with different colour, Post-It notes and then mix them up and see where the present could speak to the future and that kind of thing. It required a lot of planning, but it actually wasn’t onerous at all. And I especially enjoyed writing the historical parts.

Charlie: Well, in that case, was there a moment where you were maybe writing the historical first and then you thought, I actually I want to tell it from the present day? How did you decide from where you wanted to start the story, effectively?

Chris: Well, I’d done an awful lot of research into that women’s roles during World War II when I was working with Pat and Jean and later with fabulous Wren veteran called Christian Lamb on their various memoirs. So I did lots of research into the events around their careers and I had the voice in my head, that 1940s voice. But it did actually start as a contemporary novel; I did start thinking that it was going to be much more about the present day. It ended up having much more historical stuff in it than I expected.

Charlie: Alright. Interesting, interesting. On this, still, the writing, I suppose – how, etcetera, did you work out when you’re deciding to reveal each mystery secret? How did you come to think, “Okay, I want that there, I want that there. That’ll work there”?

Chris: Well, goodness. It was a real jigsaw puzzle with all these various Post-It notes. I was mixing them up and then during the edits thinking, I can’t have that revealed too soon. So things did get shifted around a lot. Even within each historical thread, it doesn’t run chronologically, precisely so that you can keep surprises back. The danger is when you’re writing it, that you’ve actually written something that’s very confusing but because you know in your head what you want it to be, you think it’s working and then it gets your editor and they’re like, well, what the hell’s this? But luckily that didn’t happen [chuckles].

Charlie: I didn’t get confused, but I certainly knew that I needed to keep my wits about me, which I like anyway, I like that. I would like to ask about the Invictus poem you’re using that and the Fairbairn… Fair Barn?… book.

Chris: So the Invictus, I just think it’s just such a wonderful poem. And that line, ‘Blooded but unbowed’, sums up the experience of so many people who served in World War II who saw the most horrendous things but still just kept going. It’s very sort of much more dramatic, ‘keep calm and carry on’, isn’t it? And W E Fairbairn, that is genuine. There’s a book – in the US it’s called Hands Off: Self Defence for Women and Girls, but in the UK it was just called Self Defence for Women and Girls- and that was drawn to my attention by my fabulous friend Dr David Jordan who is an expert on the history of war and he drew my attention to it and it’s the most fabulous book. It’s a self defence manual with these pictures of this very beautiful young woman in a tea dress with puffy sleeves, and her hair in victory rolls, fending off this elegantly dressed chap in a suit and a Panama hat. They demonstrate how to escape from various holds and things like that. And they’re written with such fabulous understatement – there’s one in particular, the matchbox defence. You have to remember that at the time a lot of the match boxes actually made a metal. So we’re not talking about the cardboard matchboxes that we have now, but a metal matchbox that you could put in your fist and use it to give your fist that extra welly. There’s this one particular move where you basically stick this metal matchbox in someone’s jugular and it’s all like, [puts on an old-fashioned voice] “Don’t try this at home,” or, “Do not try this on your friends”. And this is wonderfully of its time and yes, it’s very modern – it’s hard to imagine something similar now – but Fairbairn was a self defence expert. He was trained in martial arts, all sorts of martial arts, and he trained the agents who went behind enemy lines in silent killing, that kind of thing.

Charlie: So Penny, yeah, she learned it from the book but also in real life you might meet him and learn it there as well. Yeah.

Chris: Yeah. And invented a really horrendous knife as well. A knife, absolutely horrific thing but very useful if you’re having to take out a Gestapo officer in the field!

Charlie: I sure the knife you include in the book, the one that’s like really, really extreme sharp? Yeah.

Chris: And set so that you basically can’t drop it and you can use it in all sorts of different directions, that kind of thing. It’s a real. I’m talking out of my hairdo now – this is possibly not [laughs] entirely factually correct.

Charlie: It matches what you’ve written in your book, so that will have been researched wouldn’t it, so…

Chris: But you know there might be someone.. if anyone’s listening and I’m sure there are lots of people who know a lot more about Fairbairn than I do, yep.

Charlie: Artistic licence. Penny and Josephine would have known Morse code with their jobs, but I love that you just include it throughout and through the particularly important parts of the book. Can you just tell us about using that and your employment of it?

Chris: Yeah, I mean, well, the sisters communicate with each other in Morse code and they both learned Morse code during the war. Most Wrens would have been trained in Morse to a degree, and that’s how messages were sent all over the place. And the FANY, well, perhaps not in the FANY, but in the SOE, the agents who are training to go in behind enemy lines, would definitely have learned Morse. And it’s amazing how fast you can convey a message in Morse once you get to know it. Also, I remember Jean, who was the real life FANY veteran that I worked with, telling me that you very quickly could come to recognise when an agent was sending a message in Morse, you could come to recognise their fist is what she called it, which is their particular way of doing it. So that’s how they could tell if an agent had perhaps been captured by the Germans or something. They could tell that there was something slightly wrong in the way that the Morse was coming through. And it’s just extraordinary, isn’t it, to think you can hear almost an accent, someone’s voice in just these dit-dit-da-da kind of thing. And so in the book, in The Excitements, Penny and Josephine communicate in Morse, especially when they’re bored and they want to talk about people. And I wrote this into the book and before I thought whether it was possible – I thought it must be possible, because when you’re practising Morse, you’re tapping it out – but it must be possible for someone else who knows Morse to see what you’re tapping. And then later I discovered from talking to a naval historian, that he had actually seen Wren veterans doing exactly that, tapping out what they were saying or what they weren’t saying!

Charlie: Yeah, no, I love it. I mean, you use it for some real humour in the book. The bit where Sister Eugenia can translate what they’re saying is brilliant. But that is fascinating about accents; I would have never have thought… you’d think there’s so little there to make a difference or something. Yeah, that’s fascinating.

Chris: Well I suppose perhaps it’s in the abbreviations that someone chooses as well, or the word order that someone chooses, rather than just being in just the actual literal thing. Yeah. A fact that they could tell who was sending messages.

Charlie: So I loved how you transliterated what Archie was saying as well, that was fun. Talking about Sister Eugenia, I do want to ask about Davina and Sister Eugenia [Chris: yes]. I mean, Davinia seems very much that you’ve worked towards a caricature or a stereotype for fun. But Sister Eugenia is also great. Can you tell us about them, creating them, etcetera?

Chris: Well, they both contain elements of real life veterans I’ve met, I must admit. I think the thing is that we have so many assumptions about people who are in their 90s and older. We assume that they’re going to be all, “Ah, bless, they’re so sweet”. It’s a bit patronising and I think the one thing that I’ve learned through meeting and working with women in their 90s and beyond is that you don’t lose your personality just because you get older. There are cuddly 90-somethings and then there are 90-somethings who are totally acid, that you would just love to sit there having a gin and tonic and just bitching about everything with. So it’s exactly the same this as women in their 30s, 40s, 50s. So what I wanted in Davinia and Eugenia was to show is just different personalities; it’s not so much about their age, it’s just their personalities. And so Davinia is a bit of a snob and she’s very proud of her family’s vaulted naval background and she’s very bossy and she doesn’t suffer fools gladly and she’s just ungrateful for the things that people do for her, that kind of thing, because she just expects it because that’s the way she’s always lived, she’s always lived with help. So she just expects people to obey her orders. And Eugenia is a nun and has been a nun for quite a while, but she also had her wild years before she turned to God. And I think that that was important to bring out as well, that even if you are a nun that the vices don’t come anywhere, you know what I mean? That you don’t understand them. So I wanted to convey that as well.

Charlie: I feel I need to bring in Arlene [Chris: yes!]. she goes through quite a lot with Davinia, definitely. Yeah, tell us about her.

Chris: So Arlene is Penny and Josephine’s… well, I suppose we would say carer, but they hate the word carer, so they never refer to her as that in real life. I’ve heard some of the 90-somethings that I’ve worked with referring to their carers as dailies; it’s a bit of a demeaning term. But Arlene, she’s a trained carer. She’s trained in nursing and she’s looking after Penny in Josephine, but she used to look after Davinia, and that was an unhappy relationship. And to get out of it, in order to be able to leave with some grace and without too much trouble, she tells Davinia that she’s actually emigrating to Jamaica. So when they’re all suddenly together in Paris, suddenly she finds herself having to care for Davinia again because Davinia’s carer on this trip is taken ill and Arlene is the only one who can manage her. Because it’s incredibly diplomatic work. I’ve noticed this with a lot of the carers that I’ve met, is that they’re actually incredibly highly skilled at managing personalities as much as managing practical issues. And I have a great deal of admiration for the carers that I’ve met, that they’re actually incredibly skilled at managing personalities as much as managing practical issues, and I have a great deal of admiration for the carers that I’ve met, so I hope with Arlene to bring that through. We think of it as menial work, don’t we? But it’s far from menial. It’s extraordinarily important and extraordinarily psychologically and physically difficult. And I just wanted Arlene to represent that strong, extraordinarily valuable person that I’ve encountered.

Charlie: Can we say that she’s going to be wildly successful in her next life choice? It seems to be.

Chris: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I hope to bring her back in another story at some point. Yeah.

Charlie: I’m going to ask you about one of those stories, given you said in another story, I don’t know if you’ll have more than one, but I’ll ask you about that in a bit. I wanted to ask you about historical adoptions and this adoption thread, Josephine’s son, who she calls Ralph and we find out is Edgar. Why was it important to bring this in?

Chris: That, for me was… I mean, I have personal skin in the game here because I’m an adoptee, so adoption, historical and otherwise, has always been of interest to me. At that time, in the 30s and 40s, it was much more easy to just hand over a baby and for papers to disappear. Over the years, as I’ve met more and more adoptees, it’s striking how many of us were told that our records were lost in a fire, or a flood, or in my case, thrown into a skip when the adoption agency moved offices. And it’s just absolutely bullshit, I mean, excuse my language, but it seems insane that so many personal records could be lost by fire and flood, I mean, there can’t be any other government department that has more catastrophes than those relating to adoption. So I wanted to give Josephine a happy ending, but I also didn’t want to make it too schmalzy because I think that even though it’s a happy ending, it’s just the beginning of another story, isn’t it? We discover her son because, Archie’s is obsessed with ancestry and so he does the DNA test and that reconnects Josephine to her son. But it was important for me to not make it too Long Lost Family. I hope that I’ve left a degree of ambiguity of whether the relationship between mother and son will work out. Does that make sense?

Charlie: Yes, yes. I mean, we see that she’s talked to Edgar over the Internet, but then it seems that she’s meeting…

Chris: Her granddaughter, yep.

Charlie: Yes, yes. In person. So yeah, I suppose for Edgar he is quite old, maybe to travel or…

Chris: Yes, yeah, because Josephine’s nearly 100, so Edgar’s in his 80s, so I didn’t want him to appear in person in the book. I thought that would be too pat. Even though the granddaughter comes in at the end.

Charlie: Yeah, yeah. A bit too happy of an ending, almost, all tied up and lovely. Can I ask you – you don’t have to go into detail if you don’t want to, or you don’t have to answer this question if you don’t want to at all – were you able to find out about your own family, given what you said about your records?

Chris: I have found out various things. It’s very complicated and it’s obviously one of those things that’s very different from adoptee to adoptee. I think I’m more interested, rather than my own personal success, in how adoption is framed in general because I think that the framing of adoption as this big solution to this terrible societal problem is problematic and I think… It happens much less often now. If a child comes up for adoption now, it’s usually because it’s the absolute end of the road and all sorts of things have been tried to keep them within their birth family. Whereas when I was born in the 70s and obviously when Edgar, the character in the book, was born in the 1940s, there was much more emphasis on shame. And the only way for a single mother to atone for her shame was to give the baby away and start life anew. And then the babies still had that slight taint of shame with them as they went on into their new life. So it’s very different now. But I have to say it drives me absolutely insane when I see people talking about their infertility issues and everyone saying to them, “Oh, you could adopt, you could adopt,” as if it’s easy and as if there’s no loss for the child involved. You know, we’re not talking about getting a puppy – we’re talking about a human being that comes with history. We’re none of us born a blank slate. And I hope that Josephine and Edger’s story in The Excitements shows some of the pain that’s involved as well; Josephine’s years and years of longing. She can never really have a normal life after that moment, she doesn’t go on to have other children, although I know a lot of birth mothers do. Sorry, that’s a really long answer, isn’t it? And getting quite philosophical. But I suppose, yeah, that’s what I’m interested in, is that society has a very sort of… You know, I really hate Long Lost Family. I hate that show with a passion because I think it only shows the bits that people want to see and it perpetuates a myth.

Charlie: Yeah, no, I think you’ve raised some important points. I mean, I’m not adopted myself, but yeah, I know what you mean with, “Oh, you can go and adopt!” and it’s like, t’s like, well, both sides of the equation – it’s not just gonna be as simple as oh, you go and get a baby and everything’s happy an, oh, hearts and flowers and all that. There’s so much more to think about. It’s not an easy option at all.

Chris: Well, yeah, and especially not for the baby. I think what people forget is that, for a child to be available for adoption, it means they have lost a family. And I often say to people, if an adoptee told you they’ve been orphaned, you would be like, “Oh my God, that’s so terrible!” And you would want them to be allowed to have access to their ancestry, but adoption is just like, “Oh my God, what do you want to know about those people for, your birth family?” Because they gave you up. And believe me, nobody takes that decision lightly, and, and we should respect that loss, I think. That’s all. Sorry! Yes. Let’s get back to comedy. Okay.

Charlie: [Laughs.] It is a comedy, yes. Well, no, I’m gonna come up with a different question first then, because, yeah, my next question is not fun as such. It’s not awful, but, you know!

Chris: Ask me another un-fun question while we’re in the mood.

Charlie: It’s not horrific or anything. It’s more could Penny and Josephine defeated the Gunman? Was that something you’d played with?

Chris: I did play with that, but then I thought it was just a step too far. I still think if I had had another three months to finished The Excitements, that whole passage might have been more elegant, I might have managed more elegantly. But I thought, “Well, this is ridiculous, because ninety-somethings, the only way they could have pulled it off would be by accident. So it had to be Archie, and it had to be Archie overcoming his own fears to get there in the end, yeah.

Charlie: I liked it because when you had it coming in, I thought, well, this is really cool. And obviously Penny certainly has the knowledge, but I thought in those bodies at this period of time?… So, yeah, I did like how you did it. Frank’s choice to have Penny not sent back to the field. I think that there’s a for and against in there, isn’t there? In that, it was a good decision and at the same time, it obviously really affected Penny. Can you talk about your choice here in all the choices you made with this plot thread, I suppose? Yeah.

Chris: So for people who haven’t read the book, Penny is recruited by the Special Operations Executive, and trained as part of F-Section, which is F for France, to go in behind enemy lines as an agent. So there are some extraordinarily famous agents, Odette Hallowes, Violette Szabo, Noor Inayat Khan; extraordinarily brave women. And it’s just a handful of women in real life, and not all of them made it back and some of them were killed in the most awful circumstances. So when Penny was training as an agent, in early drafts of the book, she goes into France, and I was thinking, “And then what?” But I also thought, I actually don’t want to diminish the memory of the women who actually did this because it was not comic in the least. So I thought the only way I could do that was to have Penny not make it into France. But I wanted to show some of the bravery of those women by getting Penny as far as she gets on the plane for the parachute drop, but she doesn’t make the jump. So I wanted to show that she just, in that moment, is so bloody scared. She just can’t do it. She can’t do it. And while it’s possible that she would have got onto the ground and been a perfectly good agent, I didn’t want to do that because I didn’t want to mess with those memories and make light of a part of history that’s really not got a lot of comedy in it. But I did also want to show, try and show some of the degree of bravery that they needed. And so then I wanted Frank, because he’s a married man who’s having an affair, he doesn’t have a lot of redeeming qualities, except that he does understand what they’re asking of the people who are training its agents and he understands that they’re possibly asking for their lives. So I wanted that to be his gift to Penny. Because of him, she doesn’t go to France, she doesn’t face certain death.

Charlie: To think of how you wanted to respect the women and that’s why you chose it. That’s not something that I would have thought, so that was interesting. Those three women you mentioned, am I right in thinking that two of them died in concentration camps?

Chris: Violette Szabo died in Ravensbrück in 1945, and Noor Inayat Khan also died in the concentration camp. And Odette Hallowes lived into her 80s and died in 1995. But yes, extraordinarily, extraordinarily, brave women and I wanted to try and honour their memory in some way.

Charlie: The fact that two of them had died, I wasn’t expecting. I didn’t know about the drops or anything like that prior to reading your book so that was quite a shock to see, oh, goodness, two of the three people that you had mentioned had died. I think you mentioned it earlier when you were saying about what you’re writing and things that you’re considering writing. You’re writing about the character of Jinx? Is that correct?

Chris: I am, indeed. Well, I’ve just finished writing about Jinx. So I’ve got another book coming out in May, it’s called Bad Influence and it is the story of Jinx. So while it does have Jinx, who’s a character in The Excitements, as the heroine, it’s not a follow on novel from The Excitements, it’s a stand-alone novel. So Jinx, whose real name is Jennifer Sullivan, she was a child prisoner of war in Singapore during the Japanese occupation. And then she comes to the UK post-that and encounters Penny from The Excitements who’s now working as an almoner, which is a kind of social worker. And mayhem ensues because Penny is a terrible, terrible influence on Jinx, who is her protegee, who grows up to lead this life of crime. And so Bad Influence is all about Jinx trying to right a few wrongs before she dies, which involves having to go on a coach trip [laughs] to Florence with a load of senior citizens from her village. So yeah, more mayhem. Mayhem ensues, yep.

Charlie: Will you write any more books in this world?

Chris: I mean, part of the problem is that my heroines are so old [laughs].

Charlie: That is true. That is true.

Chris: It starts to stretch the limits of the imagination. Certainly if you haven’t met some of the women that I’ve met – Christian Lamb, for example, she’s 104 and she’s still very much engaged in the world and I could put her in the centre of a novel but people wouldn’t believe it; without having met her it’s hard to believe that someone could be living such an exciting and engaging life at 104, but it is possible. So it becomes more and more difficult to keep the stories going. And so at the moment in the contemporary world, I’m up to 2003. I’d like to do one more story. I’d like to have a Cold War story actually with Josephine, but whether I will or not, I don’t know yet.

Charlie: Very good points. I’m actually going to add something completely relevant in terms of age – there was a news article, gosh, maybe up to a year ago and it was this lady that was in her 90s and she was a dance school teacher.

Chris: Yes.

Charlie: So people absolutely still do that, don’t they? [Chris: Yes, yes, absolutely.] I think it doesn’t get known about enough.

Chris: Yeah, was she called Dorothea?

Charlie: Possibly… you very possibly saw the same news article I did [laughs].

Chris: Yeah. Well, no, I was lucky enough to meet a fabulous former Wren called Dorothea, who’s 99, who’s a yoga teacher. So I wonder if it’s… She’s extraordinary. She’s showed me a few stretches. She said the secret to ageing well is stretch every day and have a sunny attitude. So there you go.

Charlie: Yeah, no, it’s very possibly the same person. I will have a look, listeners, and put some links down there and all that kind of thing. One thing I wanted to ask you to end this on, isn’t to do with The Excitements – you once wrote a 90,000 word book in two months, is that true?

Chris: Yeah, I wrote a series of novellas under the name Stella Knightley. They had rather cheesy titles – The Girl Behind The Mask, The Girl Behind The Fan and The Girl Behind The Curtain and they were erotic novels, had a present day thread and the historical thread. So The Girl Behind The Mask was set in Venice in the 17th century; The Girl Behind The Fan was in France in the 18th and 19th century; and then The Girl Behind The Curtain was set in Weimar Berlin. So I was commissioned to write all three of them; I had six months. It sounds difficult, but here’s the thing that I always think – because I’ve been around the block a few times, I’ve written 40-odd novels under my real name, which is Chris Manby, and various other names – and I think you can spend as long as you want on a novel, but sometimes you get that rush of inspiration and you can get it down in a matter of weeks and then, in actual fact, if you spend the rest of the year noodling about on it, you don’t make it any better. So I don’t think the length of time it takes to write something is necessarily a marker of how good it will be. Although lately I’ve definitely slowed down and I think that some subjects are closer to your heart and others, and some subjects matter getting the right matter much more then if you’re writing a contemporary novel and you’re basing it on day to day life, you don’t have to get the facts right in the same way. But yeah, I’ve got a very fast typing speed, that’s all I’ll say! [Both laugh.]

Charlie: Yeah, no, I saw how many books you’d written and I was like, “Goodness, wow!” Yeah. I hear people writing books quite quickly, but two months I have not heard of before, I don’t think; it’s quite something.

Chris: If you think about it, it’s only really… say two months is what, eight weeks, isn’t it? I mean you’re just getting, say, about 12,000 words down a week, which when you split it that’s less than 2,000 words a day, which sounds like an awful lot, but if you think about… well, in my own case, if I think about the number of words I WhatsApp to people, it’s probably getting up close to that much, you know! So yeah, it’s not impossible.

Charlie: That is fascinating. That was really, really interesting getting your answer there. Thank you. Yeah, Chris, it has been lovely having you today and I have enjoyed your novel immensely. Looking forward to Jinx and seeing where you go with that. Thank you for being here today.

Chris: Thank you for having me.

Charlie: I do hope you enjoyed this episode. Do join me next time. And, if you have a moment to spare, please do leave. a rating and/or review of this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Podcast Addict. Thank you! Author’s Afterword episode 117 was recorded on 26th September 2024 and published on 10th March 2025. Music and production by Charlie Place.

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