Charlie and Maggie Brookes (The Prisoner’s Wife) discuss her stunning story which was inspired by a real happening – a woman who hid in plain sight as a British soldier in a prisoner of war camp.

General references:
Maggie’s previous episode with me is episode 92
Now The War Is Over
Time Watch
All Our Working Lives
The Sphinx, Maggie’s poem version of The Prisoner’s Wife
Colditz
The party episode with Maggie is Milestone 01 (also with Elizabeth Fremantle, Gill Paul, and Amanda Geard)

Books mentioned by name or extensively:
Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre
Maggie Brookes: The Prisoner’s Wife
Maggie Brookes-Butt: Wish
John Nichol and Tony Rennell: The Last Escape

Buy the books: UK || USA

Release details: Recorded 23rd September 2024; published 24th February 2025

Where to find Maggie online: Website || Twitter || Instagram

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

Discussions

01:29 The inspiration – a woman who hid as a man in a Nazi prisoner of war camp and how real it might be
09:49 How Maggie’s work as a BBC producer helped her write The Prisoner’s Wife
11:49 How the book started as a poem and then Maggie’s journey to Czechia to do research into the Long March
20:19 The inspiration of Maggie’s father, a prisoner of war who never spoke about his experience
26:58 What Maggie cut from the novel
28:52 Izzy’s character development, language progression, and ‘Algernon Cousins’
34:38 Adding in Bill’s chapters later
36:53 Ralph and his fate being left open
41:24 Scotty’s character and his sacrifice
43:28 The real Rosa Rauchbach and her lover
44:32 What are you writing now?

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 116 of Author’s Afterword, formerly known as The Worm Hole Podcast. On this podcast I talk to an author about one – occasionally more – of their books in detail. And if you find yourself enjoying today’s episode, do share it with your friends. So I’m Charlie Place and today I’m joined by Maggie Brookes to talk about the book she discussed at the end of our first conversation together, because when she told us the premise I had that feeling you get when you just know that that is going to be your favourite book by an author – and it turned out to be correct. So in this episode we’ll be discussing The Prisoner’s Wife. Izzy lives on her parents farm in World War II occupied Czechoslovakia. The men have gone to join the resistance and Izzy, her mother and younger brother are having to do it all by themselves. So when a Nazi officer offers them a work team of English prisoners of war, Izzy’s mother says yes. Despite her lack of English and his lack of Czech, Izzy and Bill find an instant connection. It will lead to a secret escape and attempt to outwit the Nazis all while Izzy is posing as a young British soldier. Welcome back, Maggie.

Maggie: Well how lovely to see you again, Charlie.

Charlie: It’s excellent to see you. I’m looking forward to this; I can’t remember when we organised this but I’m looking forward to it. So let’s start with the real story – how much you know, what Sidney Reed told you.

Maggie: Okay. So this story was told to me when I was at my mum’s sheltered accommodation one day and we were going upstairs in a lift, and talk had been of the Second World War as it very often was. And the very upright six-foot-tall gentleman standing opposite me, elderly gentleman, said, “I bet I could tell you a story about the war that would make your hair stand on end”. And I thought, “Yes! I want to hear that story”. So as soon as the lift stopped I dragged him out into the corridor and said, “Okay, tell me”. And what he told me was that he had been a prisoner of war of the Nazis, and one night two escaped prisoners were brought back into the camp. When the Nazi guards had gone away, one of the returned prisoners called for silence and said, “I’ve got something to tell you all, to tell everybody in the bunkhouse. This other escaped prisoner is not a British soldier, he’s my Czech wife.” And the hair on the back of my neck stood up and I thought, this is a good story! Sidney Reed went on to tell me what happened then, that men were banging their tin cups on the table and shouting, “There’s a woman in the camp! There’s a woman in the camp!” And the person who was in charge of the bunkhouse called for silence, and took them all to task and told them that they were to look after this person who’d been put into their care. And the only way that they could hide her and keep her safe was to keep her safe in plain sight by hiding her as a British soldier, by disguising her as a British soldier. Because if she had been discovered by the Nazis, because she wasn’t a combatant, she would have been shot as a spy. Sidney then went on to tell me that for the last six months of the war, she remained disguised as a British soldier and was protected by all the men around her. And he told it to me as a story about how great they all were to look after her, him being one of them. And all the time I was thinking, “Oh, my God, what on earth was it like for her? What was it like for her?” She must have been young. She spoke no English, or very little English, and was surrounded by men. Most of all, had to be careful not to emit a single sound because she would have instantly identified herself as a woman. What on earth would that be like? I can’t keep quiet for five minutes; I can’t imagine what that would be like [laughs]. So I knew that I had the basis of a really extraordinary once in a lifetime story in my hands.

Charlie: Have you found anything about these people? Do you know anything about their survival or anything like that?

Maggie: I tried. Sidney told me that he knew they had made it back to England because he had a postcard. He seemed to remember that the postcard was from Liverpool and it was addressed to him with a nickname that was used by people in the camp. So he knew that it was. And it just said, “We’ve made it”. Now, he says that he kept that postcard for many years – his son remembered seeing the postcard and being told the story – but of course, by the time I met him, he had left his family home and was in sheltered accommodation, and lots of things had been thrown away. At that passage of time he couldn’t remember the name of the British prisoner or of his Czech wife. I tried looking on ships’ manifests because I knew that they must have been taken home by boat to Liverpool. Unfortunately, most, if not all, of those were destroyed at some point after the war. So each thing that I tried, I drew a blank. I hoped that when the book came out, someone would say, “I know who that was. That was my Granddad, or my great granddad. I remember the story,” but unfortunately that hasn’t happened. The book’s also been published in the Czech Republic, and I’ve had various Czech amateur historians contacting me and saying, “We’ll try this end. We’ll try to find out who she might have been at this end.” But I’ve made up a lot of the details of where her farm was; I knew that it had to be in a certain area – she had to have come from a certain area – but the rest of that was filled in by imagination. So I have not been able to track down the people that the book is about. And for a little while, perhaps, as readers might, I thought, can this really be true? And then two things happened. One was that, I remembered him – and he was a man by then in his mid-80s – I remembered him going into quite a lot of detail about how she dealt with her period. And that was a kind of odd thing for an elderly gent of his generation to talk about. And that had a ring of truth about it. And then he told me that he had been in Camp E166 at Supíkovice quarry in the Czech Republic, what’s now the Czech Republic. And I looked it up and I couldn’t find it anywhere on the Internet. And then his son told me that he had been in Lambsdorf prison camp. And when I went on to the Lambsdorf prison camp site, I found a list of the work details that men were sent out on, the work groups. And each one of those that was a work detail for British soldiers began with an E number and E166 Supíkovice quarry. And suddenly there was enough there for me to think, yes, I do believe this story.

Charlie: Everything you’ve got there is adding up, yeah, I think I found the list as well, it’s on Wikipedia, which is quite interesting. I was going through the page for Lambsdorf, I think, yeah, I think it was for Lambsdorf, and it’s just scrolling, scrolling, and the list is there. It’s incredible they’ve still got it. So, yeah, that quarry story is at least somewhat founded in fact then, which is fascinating. And I actually noted down, you said when you started telling us, that the couple had come back after an escape. Is that correct?

Maggie: Well, that was Sidney’s assumption. Sidney said that the camp he was in, and I’ve not found details of this, was used, among other things, as a punishment camp for people who had escaped. And so I can only assume that that’s how – because he would have escaped; Bill, or whatever the real person was called, would have escaped from his work detail, would have gone missing from his work detail, and therefore been on the run and taken back into the Lambsdorf main prison camp.

Charlie: Okay, cause I wondered if what you meant is that the person who was Izzy had been there for a while before anyone knew.

Maggie: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think so; I think this was her first experience of being in a prison camp, and they had just gone on the run, hoping to make it to a safe country, which, you know, they were in the Czech Republic and then later in what we now call Poland. It was a heck of a long way to any safe space [chuckles]. You know, they had to get up to the Baltic or through to the Channel ports. The British prisoners were deliberately put in Lambsdorf because it was as far from home as the Nazis could put them. And so there was really no chance of escape.

Charlie: Okay, yeah. I wanted to ask how much did your work with the BBC help in this book in the research or anything? Because I think you made documentaries that were about the war?

Maggie: You’re quite right. I knew what to do and how to go about it because I had been a producer of historical documentaries for the BBC. And that varied between fairly light hearted historical documentaries and very serious stuff. But it meant that I was familiar with archives, I was familiar with the traditional methods of getting information. We didn’t have the Internet when I worked for the BBC – that would have made a big difference – but it meant that I knew how to research through the archives at Kew, for example, I went and I looked to see where I could find people coming home from Lambsdorf and whether anybody else told this story. So I tried various traditional routes. And it also helped me a lot to think about how to structure the story. I think that’s the other thing that I got from my documentaries experience, was how to recognise a good story when I stumbled across one, how to do the research for it, and also how to begin to structure it.

Charlie: It’s something I wanted to ask you for a while, actually. You’ve probably done loads, but what documentaries that we might have heard of, maybe, or the more famous ones, etcetera, did you work on?

Maggie: I walked on BBC2, a big documentary series for BBC2. One called Now The War Is Over about the immediate post-war period; I made films for the Time Watch series – one about the Russian revolution and the way that it was captured in film and the way that film was misused to give false effects; a very big series for BBC2 called All Our Working Lives, about the history of different industries in Britain. So a variety of different things.

Charlie: You wrote a narrative poem first, I believe. Can you tell us about this [Maggie: Okay], and how it transitioned?

Maggie: I was told this story in 2008, and at that point, my main writing was as a poet; I’d had three poetry collections published, I think, at that point. And I thought, I’ll just write a little poem about this story and be done with it. And the poem kind of grew and grew and grew until it wasn’t a, little poem any more, it was a long narrative poem. And even as a poet, the words, ‘long narrative poem’ strike fear into my heart [laughs], and I think, who’s going to read that? Anyway, I had the structure, I had the characters – very quickly, but the same characters that appear in the main book. I then found a wonderful poetry e-zine called Snakeskin, who agreed to publish the poem and agreed to also include an MP3, a sound version of it. So I recorded myself reading it, and those went up on their site, and I thought, okay, I’m done with that now, I’ve finished with that now, I’ll move on to something else. And I did move on to other things, but it kept nagging at me. I kept thinking, do you know what? That was a damn good story! It’s a pity that only the [laughs] tiny audience for long narrative poetry will ever see it! I perhaps ought to have a go at writing it as a novel. I went back, first of all, to see Sidney Reed, to see if he could remember any more. And sadly, by the time I went to see him, his memory was not very clear; what he did tell me was all very muddled. And I got hold of his son and tried to get some more information there. And then I started to do research about what information he had given me. It was then that I discovered about the Long March, which I hadn’t previously known about. So I was then embroiled in a lot of detailed research. You know, I’m only second generation from the war – my parents were both in the war – and yet I had never heard of… it’s sometimes called the Long March, sometimes called the Death March through Europe. I knew that there had been similar things in Japan, but I had no idea that as the Russian, Soviet, army was approaching from the east, the Nazis cleared out all of their prisoner of war camps and concentration camps in the east and just put everybody on the road, walking away from the Soviet army. Because they thought if the Soviet army caught up with them, then they would become soldiers for the Soviet army. We don’t really know what the thinking was. There is another theory that they were being marched east to form a human barrier around Hitler, to be a sort of last resort. Anyway, in the terrible, terrible winter, January 1945, they were evacuated at night. These are people who have been without proper food for three years, four years, five years, been without proper exercise, without proper winter clothing, and they were put on the road in blizzards, icy conditions, and they were marched more than 20 kilometres a night, or a day, in the end covering 500 miles to the German camps where they ended up. So when I first read about that, I thought, oh my goodness! I can’t write that! That’s too harrowing. It’s also difficult to write because it’s repetitive, you know – ‘we walked, we walked, we walked; each day, we walked each day it was terrible’. What do you write about? And I did two things. First of all, I found an amazing book called The Last Escape, which is stories of people who were on that terrible march. And the second thing was I thought, I need to go and see it, see where it was. So I persuaded my long suffering husband to come with me. And, we got a hire car in the Czech Republic. We first of all had a nice time driving around, looking at possible places that Izzy’s farm could have been. And then we went up to Lambsdorf prison camp and I was there in the snow. And then we drove one of the routes of the Long March. And as we drove we were looking out, trying to look for buildings that would have been there in 1945, saying, “Would that have been big enough to house 100 men overnight? Could a hundred men have slept there? Could they have slept there? What was the topography like? How much were you walking uphill, downhill,” things that you can’t find out from Google Maps [chuckles]. And then getting out and standing in the snow, and listening to the sounds of the snow and feeling what it was like to have snow blowing in your face when you were walking. And when I came back I thought, “Okay, I think I can have a go at writing this now”. And so that physical research, that research where I was taking loads and loads of photographs and scribbling as we drove, was invaluable to me, and I think the only reason that I was able to write the last third of the book.

Charlie: Yeah, I’m not surprised that you were considering it and thinking that it would be repetitive. I remember you saying to me, when I said I was enjoying it and you said, “Oh, it’s go going to get more harrowing,” or grim, and I thought, “Okay, alright”. And then I got to a bit and I was like, “Oh, it’s not so bad”. And then I got to the next bit and went, “Okay, maybe that’s what she meant”. And then I got.. “Oh! Right, okay!”

Maggie: I think you said that to me when they were in the prison camp and they were having to empty the latrines. That was grim by anybody’s standards. Having other people’s excrements sploshing about, and the smell of it. But actually I don’t think that was the worst. I think the Long March was the worst element.

Charlie: Yeah, no, I would agree with you, definitely, with the things that you included about people dying. That’s the thing with novels, isn’t it? That you can have that in your head and think, yes, I know that happened. But then reading it in a novel such as yours, that makes it real. Yeah, it really comes home to you.

Maggie: Absolutely. And you know to be told X number of people have died. You say, “Oh dear, that’s terrible”. But it’s sort of meaningless until you can imagine a single human being [Charlie: yeah]. And when you, particularly if you’ve really liked a character, you know, like they are helped by friendship in this book, friendship is incredibly important, and their friend Ralph is possibly my favourite character in the book – and seeing Izzy’s physical pain and Bill’s physical pain and Ralph’s and the threat of dying really young actually does make it real for you.

Charlie: Yes, it does. It definitely does. You said Ralph is your favourite character, that’s interesting. He’s definitely mine.

Maggie Is he?

Charlie: Yeah, obviously influenced by your writing.

Maggie: Interesting.

Charlie: I’m gonna bring him in later. I think it’s interesting – I’m gonna go back to what you said, at the party episode that we did a while back, because you said about feeling the snow and feeling what it’s like, and I know that you mentioned there about sensory details and you were the person that brought up clothing and what it felt like and food and what it tasted like. So, I mean the feel of snow, that’s really quite detailed and specific.

Maggie: I think that’s what makes things real, isn’t it, in historical fiction. Well, and in fiction generally. We are tactile animals. We need to be told what it’s like for all the senses. So whether you’re emptying the effluent out of a latrine and having the smell of that, or whether you’re doubled up with dysentery and being poked in the back with a rifle to keep moving, or your hands are so cold that you’re developing frostbite in you fingers and your toes, fighting over a place to sleep, finding a warm place in a pigsty while other people are sleeping out in the snow, and in the morning they’re just bundles of clothes that don’t move. These sensory details are really, really important, I think.

Charlie: Yeah. I would like to ask about your father – I’m going to get to structure in a bit, actually, the writing, but I would like to ask about your father [Maggie: yep]. If you could tell us as much as you know about what he went through in the war, because I believe he was a prisoner of war himself, and how that influenced the book, because I’m guessing it did?

Maggie: I think it had a really huge influence. I’d never set out to write about war – I’m not particularly interested in writing about war – but I have discovered that in wartime everything is heightened. It’s the worst of people and the best of people. And that makes for good stories. So my dad was young when he signed up for the war. He and the whole of his local Sunday league football team all signed up together, and they went off from Islington in North London and were taken to North Africa. He was captured in North Africa, treated extremely badly in a camp in North Africa, and then they were ferried up through Italy. They were in a prison camp in Italy, and just at the point where the Italians decided they were on the wrong side, he thought he was going to escape and that was going to be the end of it, and then they were moved up to a prison camp in Austria. So he could very, very easily have been taken to Lambsdorf. Now, my dad never ever spoke about his wartime experiences. Not a single word about them. He used to go off to reunions every year with his friends that he’d been in prison camp with. But you couldn’t ask him anything about it; he didn’t want to return to those days at all. And, when some years after he’d died and just as I was researching The Prisoner’s Wife, his best friend from the prison camp died and left behind, to his son’s great astonishment, diaries that he had kept in prison camp. How he had smuggled them out and, from one camp to another, remains a bit of a mystery, but he did, and he had them. And his son lovingly transcribed them. And because my dad was his best mate, my dad was on every page of the diaries. So his son gave me one of the very few copies that they had made, and I learned all about the horrors that he had experienced. And he was… oh, what a lovely man, what a kind man – somehow he had come through these terrible experiences and they had not maimed him, he had just pushed them into a box in the back of his head, which he didn’t want to visit again. So I knew – one of the major things that happens in The Prisoner’s Wife – I knew that every rank, including and below sergeant, did not sit in the prison camp like they did in the Colditz series for the whole of the war; they actually went out work parties. And the Geneva Convention said that the capturing party could send out soldiers to work for them as long as they were not engaged in war work. Now, it has to be said that the Nazis sent people out to do all sorts of things that we might consider were war work – working for chemical industry, working in the mines. My dad was lucky in a way, he was building roads in Austria. And I decided that Bill would be an agricultural worker rather than an industrial worker, because it was there that they were more likely to meet local girls. And from the diaries that my dad’s friend left, I know that they did meet local girls [laughs] and in fact, I did read something about the boats that they went home on, and quite a lot of men turning up from Italy to the boats that were going to take them m home with Italian girls in tow who they said were their wives, and apparently these women caused quite a lot of trouble on the boats [laughs]. So it was not unknown for men to be able to have liaisons with local girls. So I could imagine that happening. So from my dad’s experience, anybody who’s read the book will recognise Bill’s experience. Which brings me slightly to an editorial change. I don’t know if people are aware that once you’ve sold your book, as I sold the book to Penguin, the editor can pretty well ask you to do anything – you can say no, but they know best. And the version of the book that I gave to my editor was, first of all, not chronologically told as it is now, but started at the point where they were in the prison camp and then told their love story in flashback. And she didn’t like that, she wanted it told chronologically. And also when I gave it to her, it was all told from Izzy’s point of view, because it was Izzy’s point of view that I thought was so interesting. You know, the what on earth was it like for her moment. How did she cope with all these dangers of the Nazis around her and doing pat-down body searches and hiding her period and just being in a bunkhouse with 200 smelly men, you know, lots of things. How did you cope with all of that? So I had written it all from her perspective, and my editor said, “No, I think we need some chapters from Bill’s perspective”. And I kind of stomped off and said, “Well that’s not what my book’s about!”, and then thought about my dad and decided that I would use his experience as the basis of Bill’s experience. And that was how the Bill chapters were born.

Charlie: My word! Well, I love that you had those diaries; that’s lovely. Because if he’d never told you anything himself because he couldn’t – yeah, you’ve got that information and you’ve been able to pay homage to it in a way, I suppose, through the book [Maggie: yes]. That’s wonderful.

Maggie: That’s right. You know, to pay homage to what all of them suffered.

Charlie: I think, yeah, I can see where your editor was coming from. And that actually reminds me of a question that I also had. So I think you cut 30,000 words?… [Maggie laughs.] Is this 30,000 to do with the advice that your editor gave you or is there other things to know about?

Maggie: No, the 30,000 was prior to the editor buying it. So I sent this book to 20 agents before the 21st accepted it. And she accepted it, but said it’s 30,000 words too long. Novels are generally between about 80 and 100,000 words, and it was 130,000. She said, “I want you to cut 30,000 words out of it”. And that was really hard. I suppose what I’d done was I had fallen in love with the research. I’d found, for example, there was a newspaper produced by the men at Lambsdorf, and I got hold of copies of that and I wanted to include everything that was in this newspaper! The shows that they put on, the gambling that went on, the sports days, all of the things that they kept themselves occupied with. So I just cut and cut and cut and cut, until I had got rid of 30,000 words. And my agent then sent it out to Penguin Random House who bought it overnight in a pre-emptive deal. So she was right.

Charlie: Yeah, I can see the reason for cutting that. I mean to me it sounds really, really fascinating. But then I think I’m kind of like you of research, I’m like, “Everything, everything!” But, yeah, I suppose it could have been a lot of information to take in and gone away from your basic linear story.

Maggie: I think it slowed down the story. And there were scenes that I loved and I thought were really interesting, and actually then I thought, “Can we do without it? Yes, we probably can.” So out they went.

Charlie: I suppose this is a bit of a pivot, but I think we can talk about the structure as well itself. I noted very much Izzy’s character development. You’ve got first person, so some people might go, “Well, obviously, Charlie!” But she’s rather young, understandably at the beginning, but by the end she is far older than her years. So, yeah, I just want to ask you how you developed her and what was important, the thoughts that you had, etcetera? I’ll leave it there for you to fill us in.

Maggie: Well I started off by thinking about what would this girl be like, what would this girl have been like who would run off with a British soldier and leave her home? And I thought, well, she would have been very bored through the years of the war; she’s stuck on a farm, there’s no young men around, suddenly there’s excitement in her life. She would have had to have been daring and courageous. So I started to piece together what her character must have been like in order for her to do the things that she did. Foolhardy, perhaps, rebellious, those sorts of things. And, you know, drawing on what we remember of ourselves as teenagers and the things that we may have done that we wouldn’t have told our parents, and the things that we may have done that we now see were not very sensible! And then how she has to become somebody different. She’s not able to speak, she’s having to learn another language, she’s having to trust strangers. So a whole lot of different things that are going to turn you into a different person. And then, I suppose she developed through the drafting process. I think, might be wrong in this, but I think the final draft was numbered draft 17. Now, that doesn’t mean – or perhaps it does mean – it was completely rewritten 17 times, but probably more than that, actually. Each little section I would go over and go over and go over and you’d think, what’s she really going to be thinking here? And having her first person helped me get into her head, helped me try to see the world through her eyes. And I thought that was really important, that if she can’t speak in dialogue, it was really important that we were hearing her thoughts very, very close up. And I had a lot of thinking about, but she’s thinking in Czech – do I have to write in some kind of pigeon Czech? And then thought, no, I definitely don’t want to do that. That, I think, is how her character developed to the really strong, courageous woman she is at the end.

Charlie: I wonder if I can get you to be a bit more detailed on something that I really liked with that, in that you’ve got Izzy’s use of the soldier that she effectively becomes, the Cousins, Algernon Cousins, and she takes on this persona, and she thinks about who she would be if she was him, effectively. And first, it’s kind of just referring to him in her mind, and you’re like, “Okay, yeah, she’s just thinking this, that, and the other,” and then it almost becomes that she becomes him, and that increases her strength.

Maggie: I certainly didn’t mean to imply that a woman can only be strong by acting like a man, because I don’t believe that for one minute.

Charlie: Oh, certainly.

Maggie: But I felt that in this particular case, she had to, first of all… you know, I walk like a girl. She’d have to learn how to not walk like a girl. So she tries to think about this invented person, Algernon Cousins. She invents for him a whole backstory that enables her to act in certain ways. So would she look into the face of the German who is counting them, or would she not? What would Algernon do? What would Cousins do? I suppose it’s like method acting, really, to get into role in such a way that she can protect herself. And it was helpful to me in thinking about how to develop her character, but also, I think, helpful to her to survive.

Charlie: Yeah, it helped her deal with the situation and, yeah, blend in as well. I did love the development of language as well with her. You talk about it at length at the start, and she’s thinking of Czech and she’s thinking of English, and she’s learning English, and then later on, you leave that out, that literal reference to language, and then you leave it totally in the subtext. Yeah. I’ve noted here, like Max lending Izzy Jane Eyre. You don’t comment on it, he just lends it to her. And that in itself just says so much about her progress as a person and her language development, which I found lovely.

Maggie: Well, I suppose it’s always said, isn’t it, if you want to learn a language, you just have to immerse yourself in it. And there she would have been completely immersed in English, everybody’s speaking English all the time around her. And the strange words that are part of the soldiers speak. I have her at one point saying, “Am I going to go to England and be using words that soldiers in a barrack room use without even knowing it?’ But she can’t speak. She doesn’t speak those words. Those words are only spoken in her head. And then starting to read things; because they did have access to books and obviously it was a way to pass those endless, endless days. And it seemed to me that Bill would have read aloud to her. And that would be something really rather charming and lovely that they did together. And he could start off by reading the camp newspaper and showing her the words and then slowly, slowly starting to read proper novels to her.

Charlie: It’s fascinating. I’m going to get onto Bill again, kind of, because you said about structuring and I suppose I want to ask, when it came to working with what your editor had suggested in including these chapters, how did you do that? Did you just simply slot his, the third person narrative, in? Did you have to change what you’d already written to work around it?

Maggie: A bit of both really. Because of course as soon as I started to write about him, he had his own perspective and his own view, so what he was seeing and thinking changed. And I think it was a good call, I think, to include Bill’s point of view because it does – it rounds somebody if you see them as someone else sees them as well as the way that they see themselves. So it rounded Izzy’s experience and also brought Bill to life much more strongly. Rather than just being the boy that Izzy had fallen in love with, he was the man who was charged with keeping her safe. So I wrote the first chapter from Bill’s point of view and I sent it off to my editor and I thought, “Well, she’ll either like that or she won’t,” in a kind of very indignant way. And she came back and said, “Yes, that’s exactly what I wanted – give me more”. And I didn’t want to alternate – one from her, one from him so there are far fewer chapters from Bill’s point of view than there are from Izzy’s. I wanted to keep it her story. But there are enough, I think, to give this rounding of the whole story.

Charlie: Yeah, certainly. Yeah, certainly. I mean, I definitely have a very strong picture of Izzy in my head and yeah, I have less of one of Bill, but I think that’s appropriate, isn’t it? And also I think, because there’s a lot going on with the other male characters as well, who I also have got better pictures of. But yeah, it is very much Izzy’s story.

Maggie: Yeah. It also brings us to the title that I wanted the title to be, ‘The Girl Made of Silence’, but my editor didn’t like that and they came up with ‘The Prisoner’s Wife’, which I was a little bit sorry about because she’s so much more than somebody’s wife [Charlie: yeah] and I wanted her to be more central than that. But titles and covers are what sell books, so you have to bow those things.

Charlie: Yes! So you said about Ralph being your favourite character, and I think, yeah, he’s my favourite character. And there were some things that I did want to ask specifically. You’ve got this conversation on class with Ralph and also with who he is. If you could talk about his creation, but also, yeah, bring the choice of how you wrote it in regards to the questions of class and things like that as well.

Maggie: Well, Ralph and Max and Scotty, the three characters who really surround her and help her and save her, came to me very early on when I was writing the poem. They’re there in the long narrative poem, brief, but they’re there. There’s a great joyous moment when you’re writing where something happens that you weren’t… you’re tapping away at your computer and conversations are happening and suddenly a character says something that you weren’t expecting them to say, as if they have just become real and stepped into the room. And that is so joyful. And Ralph was there; Ralph was someone who stepped into the room. And I wanted there to be discussions because Izzy wouldn’t have been aware of the British class system. Bill was quite a long way down the ladder, and Scotty’s further still, Ralph was not upper class by any means, but he had been to university so he was in a whole different ball game. And it was one of those fascinating things that people were thrown in together during the war with people from very, very different backgrounds from themselves. So I wanted to explore that. It’s not a central theme of the book, but it was something that seemed important to me.

Charlie: I’m gonna stick on Ralph, although this is obviously towards the end of the book, but can you talk about your decision to leave his fate open ended at the end?

Maggie: Yes. I had hoped that there might be a sequel to the book and I would have liked, I would still like, to write about these characters in the late ’40s and 1950s in the Britain that they came back to, because they would all have been subject to prejudice in different ways. Bill had pulled himself up by his bootstraps, really. He went off to the war a working class boy but he had learned so much and seen so much that he was ready to take a very different place in the world and wanted to become a music teacher. Would he have been allowed to do anything but go back to his position as a railway clerk? So I wanted to explore that. I wanted to explore Max as a Jewish boy. Would he have encountered anti-Semitism after the war? Izzy as a girl who would have had an accent that would have sounded German to British people – how would she have got on? How would she have got on with his working class family, being a foreigner? And Ralph – it’s never spelled out explicitly – but it seems pretty clear that Ralph is gay and would have had to face prejudice of his own kind when he returned. So I wanted to explore how life would be for them. I decided I would leave Ralph’s fate in the balance because it was in the balance for so many people. Did he make it back? Didn’t he make it back? And I didn’t want to tie up every end. Similarly, I could have brought Izzy and Bill back to the UK. And at one point I had actually written a letter, that was a letter that she sent to her mother some years later, as an epilogue. And then we decided, no, it was better to leave it at the point where they’re looking forward to this brave new world that they would be part of. And perhaps had The Prisoner’s Wife not come out on the 26th of March 2020, when there were no bookshops [chuckles], there were no book festivals, there was no… you know, had it made its way into the bestseller lists, then perhaps I would have been able to write the sequel that I wanted. Who knows?

Charlie: Yeah, no, that’s understandable. Also, I don’t know if it needs one, though, as such. I like that thread that’s left untied with Ralph because it gives you that thing to think about and also does remind you just how bad the war could be and how it could leave things like that, yes. I would like to ask about Scotty’s character development and his sacrifice for Izzy when we know he saved his sister. Just, I suppose, your thoughts when you were writing it, because I thought it was interesting – it took me until the end of that thread for me to realise what you’d been doing in the other scenes. Now, that could be me, I could be silly, compared to other readers, but, yeah, I just wanted to ask about that, creation, and your thoughts.

Maggie: Well, Scotty actually came from something that Sidney Reed told me right back at the start. He was telling me about the mix of people in the camp. And remembered somebody who was part of what he called the Glasgow Razor Gang. That apparently they used to keep razors in the peaks of their peaked cap that they could then just slash someone with, not very pleasant. And I thought, “Oh, Glasgow Razor Gang! I’ll have one of them in my story!” And I thought, “Okay, perhaps he’s joined up because he’s on the run. What is he on the run from?” And I thought, I don’t want him to be completely unsympathetic. So perhaps he’s on the run from having committed a crime in order to save someone else. Which instantly, although he has committed a terrible crime, it puts him in a different kind of category in your head. And then, of course, I started to think about what will happen to him at the end of the war. Would he then have to go to prison, again, having been in a prison camp for all these years? Would he want to do that? And thinking of him as a person who has actually already shown himself to be willing to sacrifice himself to help another. So that was really how Scotty’s character came about. And I wanted him to be rough and ready and different from the book-loving others, but also someone that we can love.

Charlie: Yeah, I found it to be almost a short story. You’ve got all the makings of a short story, obviously, over the course of the chapters of Izzy. It was very interesting. Talking, I believe this is of the quarry, and I’m guessing you wrote this in your acknowledgments, because I wrote this down a few weeks ago, I don’t know where I got it from [chuckles], but I’m guessing it’s from there – there was a real man who loved Rosa Rauchbach?

Maggie: Yeah, there is a book which I’m not going to recommend to anybody because I didn’t enjoy it [laughs], but there was a real man as at Supíkovice quarry, and he fell in love with the owner’s daughter. And they seemed to find a way that they could get out through open windows and get to be together. It certainly seems that it was not unheard of for prisoners to form these liaisons with local women. It was helpful research in the sense of descriptions of the place. The book was written by the man himself and ghostwritten with a professional writer. As I say, I didn’t enjoy it, I didn’t enjoy the character and the way that he presented himself, but it was useful in research terms.

Charlie: Okay. So I think the last question is going to have to be, can you tell us what you are working on now – I believe it’s Brenda’s Summer of Love?

Maggie: I’m working on two things now. I’m working on a novel about the amazing British women doctors during the First World War. On the day after the war broke out, an amazing Scottish surgeon called Elsie Inglis went to the British War Office and offered her services. And the man who was interviewing her leaned across the desk to her and said, “My good woman, go home and sit still”. And she did not do anything of the kind! And so there’s a fabulous story there. And the other thing I’ve been working on is a story about 1967. Having been working on all these very gloomy stories about wars, I decided I’d like to write something jolly. So I’m also working on a story called Brenda and the Summer of Love.
Charlie: So are you working on these concurrently? Can we expect to see two books?

Maggie: Who knows? Who knows? The thing that is coming out first is a poetry collection, which is my new and selected poems It’s called Wish.

Charlie: I believe that’s under the name Maggie Butt?

Maggie: It’s going to be an amalgam – Maggie Brookes-Butt.

Charlie: Okay. Maggie, thank you so much for coming back! It has been lovely reading it. I enjoyed the review process and then I realised, yeah, I absolutely need to get you in person to talk about it. So, yeah, thank you.
Maggie: Thank you so much for having me, Charlie. Thank you for reading the book. Thank you for asking such intelligent and interesting questions which have made me think about the characters and think about the writing process all over again.

[Recorded later] 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 116 was recorded on 23rd September 2024 and published on 24th February 2025. Music and production by Charlie Place.

Photo credit: Lyn Gregory

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