Jubilee and when life mirrors art

I've been away from this blog for a long time, desperately trying to complete my third novel, Jubilee.

This morning something happened which literally made a shiver run down my spine. Jubilee, in part, is the story of some ten-year-old children who are evacuated from London to the countryside where I live. They come from an inner city life to the Berkshire Downs and learned a new life, which involved being close to sheep and pigs and chickens.

This morning, while I was doing the hoovering, a man knocked on the door. Turns out he'd been evacuated to this very cottage as a ten-year-old at the beginning of World War 2. He was in the village to commemorate the start of the war.

So all the time I was writing my novel I was sitting in a cottage which had witnessed events very similar to those I was dreaming up.

We showed him round the cottage and chatted about life then and now, and some of the families who'd lived in the village, and whose descendants are still here.