Unlike other novels I have written, the entire story of Tommy Glover’s Sketch of Heaven came to me one day as I was gazing out of the window. I let it ferment for a year, played around with the tense and narrative voice a bit, but then it just seemed to write itself.

It was sparked by the idea that it might be interesting to look at a dysfunctional couple through the candid eyes of a child. I knew the child would have to be an outsider, because offspring are far too enmeshed in the politics of family relationships to view things with the candour I was looking for. The obvious answer was an evacuee, a child from an impoverished but loving background, thrust into the bizarre private relationship of an inscrutable couple.

This set it clearly in the Second World War. I had a wonderful time researching it, listening to elderly neighbours, friends and relatives who harbour all sorts of fascinating stories and secrets.

Although I hadn’t chosen it deliberately, as soon as I started writing, I knew the Home Front of the Second World War was the ideal setting. Everything was stripped down to basics then: love and death. It was a good, clear canvass to work on.

I think my generation was a bit dismissive about the war. We saw the ex-army generation accusing us all of being longhaired layabouts. Now, as we grow older, we feel a huge guilt and excitement as we lift the lid on that enchanting pot.

When I was about three-quarters of the way through the novel, I woke in the middle of the night and scribbled down the last paragraph. It wasn’t until I wrote those lines that I realised what the book was really about. It is about how much children matter. In the book we see a whole range of ways in which human beings hurt each other, the deepest and cruellest being those hurts inflicted as children. They range from physical child abuse involving the lonely Tommy Glover to the devastating emotional cruelty suffered by Aunty Joyce at the hands of her mother, and which she subsequently allows from her husband. This damage and hurt is passed on from generation to generation, and it takes the unwitting astuteness of a child – the outspoken evacuee Kitty Green – to break the chain.

I’m told the story makes people laugh out loud as well as making them cry. If this is true, it is because I am always afraid of drifting into sentimentality, and comedy is my way of not embarrassing myself.

I found it very easy to slip back into that childhood persona who wants to know everything but is told nothing. I well remember finding out the most juicy information from sitting behind the sofa at home and humming softly so that chatting adults would think I was fully engaged in a game. Similarly, Kitty uncovers breathtaking secrets by keeping her head down at the women’s village knitting group. She may not always interpret things correctly, but she is certainly proactive with the information.

Everything that happens to us in childhood is magnified one hundredfold in our experience. And yet children are dismissed, talked over, pushed out of conversations and deemed not to feel things which they cannot articulate.

Tommy Glover’s Sketch of Heaven is a book about the many ways people find to hurt each other, and the immense redemptive power of children, if only we look after them.

It did turn out to be a mystery. It is also, by the way, a love story.

“A gentle, poignant, achingly funny tale…Jane Bailey has a rare talent for moving one profoundly without ever overplaying her cards.”
Serena Mackesy

“…absorbing, compelling and intensely moving…Studded with hilarious and unexpected turns of phrase.” Lesley Glaister