Tag: Netley Hospital

The little details

The view from the huts at Netley

When writing historic fiction, the little details are the things that bring the story to life. At the beginning of the pandemic I was writing Plagued and I was totally immersed in the world as it was in 1918. I’d read several books of soldiers personal accounts of their time in the trenches, books written by a nurse on the Western Front, details of the chain of evacuation, information about Netley Hospital and about the Spanish Flu. The photographs I found helped me get the feel for what it would have been like, both in France and in England, but it was the little details about the era that made all the difference.

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Family Research for dummies

Thomas John Haley

When I first started to research the book that would eventually become Plagued, one of the biggest stumbling blocks was a lack of information. It was always going to be a book heavily influenced by my grandfather’s story but the facts were thin on the ground. I knew he’d been shot, I knew how it happened and I knew a little about his journey across France to safety. The problem was, the first hand story was told to me when I was a child. I didn’t ask the right questions because I didn’t know what I’d need to know. So how exactly did I go about finding out more and how can my experience help other would be family historians?

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Heaven and hell

13 September 2018

Back on the first floor we entered the upper gallery of the hospital chapel. In front of us was a glorious stained glass window and a beautifully painted ceiling. For the poor wounded soldiers, fresh from the horrors of the front line, the sense of peace and quiet here must have felt a little like heaven. We stood for a moment or two drinking in the atmosphere and then walked slowly along the line of pews reading the stories of some of those who once worshipped here.  Continue reading Heaven and hell