In case you missed this piece, take a look – you’ll meet Robert and Jennifer Ravens who own and manage the beautiful Bridestowe Lavender Farm which inspired the story of The Lavender Keeper.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-04-23/the-lavender-keeper/3966694
In a field of lavender at dusk in Saignon - alpine Provence.
Is there a flower – other than perhaps a rose – which evokes more emotion than lavender? Lavender is one of those supreme species that boasts an elite acceptance and affection globally. It’s as common in gardens around the world as mint or rosemary and its product from the purer strains – essential oil – as prized as gold. I’m sure I heard somewhere that ounce for ounce, it’s as precious and expensive as gold.
Its fragrance, when you pick a stalk and smell the flowers or crush them in your palm, brings to mind grandmothers, softness, calmness, prettiness, security and peace. Would you agree? And it’s why putting lavender – as a plant, as an income, as a family’s way of life and particularly personnifying it in a man….plus giving it a sort of magical quality in my novel – made its positive images all the more powerful for surrounding it with the negative images of war, fear, angst, death, blood.
As I wrote my story the lavender began to have a life force of its own in the novel.
True ‘lavender fin’ – or lavandula angustifolia- is the wild stock that grows in alpine Provence above 800 metres in stony soil. For flourishing fields you need arid countryside with a hot dry summer and a cool, wet winter.
Wild lavender of the Luberon in stony soil
Lavender’s therapeutic properties have been known for centuries. It is believed the plant was referred to as ‘spikenard’ in passages in the Bible so this herb has been a part of our lives for as early as man can remember. It is essentially a plant of the Mediterranean and found its way into northern Europe – particularly Britain- via the Romans I gather it was the Greeks who cultivated it first. In the dark and middle ages, people would scent their houses with it through potpourri or using the stalks of lavender on their earthen/stone floors to be crushed underfoot with other aromatics to freshen the stale air as much as to discourage rats and mice!
Monasteries used it for medicinal purposes and, given that it was an herb, people would use lavender for culinary purposes, often to mask the flavour of rotten meat.
Lavender honey from the Sault region of the Luberon
Today’s cooks might use lavender – sparingly please! – to scent a meringue or perhaps even flavour a chicken casserole – I have – but cooks from ancient times were familiar with a powdered variety that was regarded as a condiment for the table. I can’t imagine dusting my food with such a floral additive, can you?
Eating a lavender-scented meringue at Sault - one of the best lavender districts in Provence ... and very beautiful too
Today, it finds its way into our lives in many commercial ways, from perfume through disinfectant to medicines and even food. We rub it on our skin, we spray it on our bodies, we inhale it when we sleep, we wash our hair in it, we wash our clothes in it, we even wash our dogs with product containing lavender!
What I discovered in my research though is that there is lavender…and there is lavender. True French Lavender, gathered mainly in rural, southern alpine France is infinitely less astringent than its hybrid and its fragrance powerful (more on this in another blog).
Wild lavender gathering became more intensive toward the late 1800s. It’s incredibly hard work as I discovered when I visited the Museum of Lavender – Musée de la Lavande – in Coustellet, Provence. There I was able to not only smell the essential oil from both types of lavender – the true lavender and ‘lavandin’ as we know it – but I walked through the decades of commercial lavender growing and the advancements in everything from how it was cut and gathered to the great leaps in progress as to how the essential oil was distilled.
Museum of Lavender, Coustellet, Luberon in Provence
Something in the order of 100 tons of lavender essence was produced in Provence in the early 1920s, almost all of it achieved from wild lavender. Contemporary estimates of production suggests Provence today yields just 25 tons of essential oil, and almost all of it from cultivated fields. In the early 80s, The Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée came into being to offer protection of lavender essential oil from the Haute-Provence region against competition from other European sources. Fields must now lie within specific boundaries and are subject to stringent testing in order to carry the AOC authority. Competition is now strong, not just for the right to name new lavenders and to bear that all important AOC sigil but during the 1960s when perfume was exploding as a major industry, almost all the lavender was going to Grasse for the big French perfume houses to produce their beautiful scents, but now Grasse competes against other big producers of fragrances such as the US and especially Japan.
When my story begins in 1942, the village-folk gather the lavender using scythes. For women it was a cuillette and for men it was a slightly heavier, larger version called a faucille. Men wore baskets, women gathered the lavender into long aprons. They’d toil all day. Wealthy lavender growers would have their own stills but mostly those stills that heated up the raw plants and distilled the essential oil would be a rather grand copperaffair on a wagon that could be hitched to a horse and moved around the region for the farmers to rent.
Lavandiers...note the women's large apron sack and the scythes
By WWll, the hybrids that were deliberately planted out to help farmers return to the rural regions of France after the Great War, had begun to flourish and the new ‘ordinaire’ had begun to choke away the lavender fin. During the war lavender was an important antiseptic for the marching armies and some French growers were considered ‘essential services’, many of them permitted to remain on the land and not be conscripted by their German masters to be sent to the Front and fight on behalf of the Third Reich. This is how my lavender grower comes to be working his fields in 1942 and not holding a gun.
The dusk light on the lavender is gorgeous. Ian in a field around Saignon, Provence
One of the important balances to achieve when writing a novel that has required much research, is finding the perfect amount of information to dripfeed into the story that keeps it interesting for readers, while resisting the urge to pile in everything that the writer has learned. It’s very easy to feel that you’ve had this enormous education in a short time and you want to share it with readers. I found myself having to fight the desire to give all of you a lot more background to my lavender grower’s profession.
Driving around the Luberon - fields of lavender flanked our journey
I hope when you read the book you’ll find the snippets that I did leave in to be just the right amount to evoke the images you need so that you can walk the fields with him, smell the lavender, hear the bees darting around the flowers, and be able to picture in your mind the villagers in their back-breaking work during the hot summer months reaping the lavender.
In Sault, Provence.
In London, trying to recreate a bomb-blitzed London in my mind
One of the obstacles you encounter as a novelist is having lots of great ideas for a storyline but realising you know very little indeed about certain subject matters that you’ve already decided are integral to the story. And you can’t fudge it – not with mainstream fiction…and especially not with anything historical. You will be found out. There is always someone who knows more, or knows better. I like to do a lot of reference book reading before I begin writing. I trust the material that is presented by scholars and by published non-fiction authors because they too will have gone through rigorous checks. Even so, one historian’s estimation of how many Jews perished on Hitler’s demonic orders and another historian’s belief about the same can differ and so getting information accurate does depend on the source.
A major hurdle for me was that once I’d decided I wanted to follow the fortunes of an Allied spy for one of my lead characters I couldn’t let the idea go but I knew absolutely nothing about being a spy, how spies were recruited, trained, how they set up the structure of their clandestine lives, how the fear felt, how they coped emotionally with the constant stress of being found out, how they set aside the threat that death stalked them at every corner.
Arrest, despair, death (courtesy of David Harrison)
How did they learn their backgrounds, how did they learn how to move through different landscapes…honestly I had so many questions and each additional question seemed to open up an abyss of new ones.
There are books, of course – and I read several of them relating to agents. They were all heroic, poignant and heartbreaking in their own way as so many fine, brave people were lost with their families and friends not even knowing they were spies. The Net is a wonderful tool but most writers grasp that it’s all in the little detail that makes a novel come alive and it was that amazing minutiae – usually the more emotional stuff – that I simply could not get from a reference page.
I wanted to talk to a spy … but spies are hard to run across! Besides, any still living would be extremely elderly and I was loath to hassle.
Violette Szabo's fake French ID Card...one of Britain's remarkably female spies
And then I found David Harrison. Ah, David…that was a good day when I stumbled across you out there in the ether. David is an historian but with a particular interest and hobby in the Special Operations Executive – a group of men and women who operated Britain’s clandestine activities in Europe as part of the War Ministry in London during WWll. His knowledge of the life of a spy was astonishing and almost any questions I asked, from what sort of food would they eat at such and such to how would my character have logically made a journey from here to here, he just knew! He also knew a whole pile more and our email conversations raged day and night between the Huon Valley in Tasmania where I was writing to Lytham St Anne’s in northern England for many months as I put together my chapters that involved getting a British-based spy ready for active duty in France.
Night drops into France...remember, these are teachers, bus drivers, acrobats!
Francis Cammaerts in 1944
David remained patient with me and constantly found new ways to grab my attention from sending me wonderful old clippings from previously secret files to DVDs featuring master spies like a man known simply as Roger.
Roger – in real life was Francis Cammaerts – a tall, dashing Brit with a Belgian father so he spoke fluent French, went to Cambridge, was a conscientious objector but was ultimately persuaded to join the spy network. He is one of the best known, certainly one of the most successful organisers of the resistance network in Occupied France and particularly via his brilliant Jockey circuit that constantly sabotaged German communications. He was a handsome fellow, admired by French patriots who didn’t want to toe the line with Berlin, and never stayed longer than a couple of nights in any spot during the war…such was his concern for security of the people who helped him.
Cammaerts was a teacher and a fine example of how so many of Britain’s most talented spies were recruited from everyday people with everyday jobs. This is what interested me the most and I wanted my spy to be the most down to earth person, who shunned attention and was perhaps the least likely individual that one might pick as a spy. David helped me enormously to build this character’s training from the day of recruitment.
David Harrison with Francis and Nan Cammaerts in 1999. Cammaerts died aged 90 and had continued to spend most of his life in France
More than anything, I needed to understand how the secretive Special Operations Executive actually functioned and David was a wealth of information with this; most particularly with helping me to breathe life into some of its well known personnel including Buckmaster, its chief; Vera Atkins, his formidable assistant, and head recruiter, Jepson.
SOE's Maurice Buckmaster, master spymaker
It was David who taught me about interview rooms in hotels to how to set up a dead letter drop in France. So many agents died…often given up by collaborators and a surprising number of them were women. These women were so incredibly brave, often facing torture of the most ruthless kind before being killed…and these were teachers, nurses, everyday folk taking on an heroic task to help keep their country safe.
Without David’s knowledge, that he passed on so willingly and enthusiastically, I would never have learned about places like Wanborough Manor where a lot of training was undertaken from learning how to read maps and code to how well they performed under intoxication. I learned from David that it was at Wanborough that the staff would decline around 30% of potential spies from going forward with their training.
Each day at Wanborough began with a cross country run to maintain fitness. A lot of these people had to live rough and were constantly on the move so having strong, healthy, fit bodies was paramount.
Wanborough Manor where initial training for SOE agents took place
Familiarity with France and especially the language was a prerequisite for all trainees, so recruits came from Canada to Mauritius but of course there were plenty of Brits with a French ancestry, which is how I set up my character. Ages ranged from 18 can you believe to 40 years. Most were men but over the course of the war there were 50 female agents who operated in France. Many died as I mentioned earlier.
Waiting staff, barristers, bankers, journalists, a bus driver, ice cream maker, racing driver, chef, taxi driver, fashion designer, actor, boxers, even a coupe of acrobats made it through the full training to become agents. Amazing, eh? Plenty, of course, came from the armed forces.
Vera Atkins, formidable and brilliant assistant to Maurice Buckmaster, both of whom I feature in The Lavender Keeper
Sometimes we’d chat about the cricket, grandchildren, weather but mostly our notes were short and sweet, although David would almost always have an interesting attachment to add to his that would entice me to delve further. Here’s a typical note I’d send: David, when agents were repatriated from France was it done so by air or ship.
And his reply: Usually by air. Le Bourget to Hendon was a common route.
Painting of Virginia Hall sending messages
I might send David ten of those a day, of course! And he was always back through the night with terrific answers, always precisely what I needed.
So it was through this wonderful correspondence that I learned how to build a life around my character, recruited as an agent and sent to France, and even though mine is a fictional character, I was able to imbue those passages with truth because I had such a reliable and trustworthy source of information.
SOE was incredibly secretive as you can imagine. So much of its records were destroyed deliberately or lost in fires and moves. However, its people were brave and committed. If you’d like to find out more, I’m sure David would be glad to hear from readers or anyone interested in F-Section…as it was known.
I’d like to thank David here for his enthusiastic and unrelenting assistance even to as recent as last night when I sent a quick email along the lines of: ’you haven’t got any good images I can use for my blog, have you?’ And of course, by the time I woke up, there were about 17 waiting for me in my inbox, all captioned, all cleared for use. Typical David! His page contains a list of all the 425 agents of the SOE French Section who operated in enemy-occupied France in WW2. For anyone wishing to find out more about individual agents or their circuits – contact www.soe-french.co.uk
Lysander Pickup - Home in 2 hours
Where to begin? Anyone who has been to Paris will know why it’s a city that most visitors want to return to. I have to admit I have been fortunate enough to visit this city often enough that I’ve lost count – firstly because I was raised on England’s south coast so a crossing on the ferry to France was easy. But then I joined the travel industry and Paris was invariably on a European itinerary. When I turned full time writer I found that not only did all of my books have a European flavour that was aided by researching in France but a fantastic French publisher also noticed me so my books are now translated into the world’s most beautiful language. Finally, I admit to being a Francophile so I need very little excuse to include Paris – and France – on my swoops into Europe and increasingly I find myself setting my stories in this magnificent capital and its gorgeous country.
Fields of lavender in Provence helped inspire the story
As I’ve explained in earlier blogs, Paris was always going to be a setting for the main part of The Lavender Keeper but getting to know my way around today’s Paris is all very nice but my job as the writer of this WWll story required me to have a strong feel for wartime Paris and especially how Paris operated under occupation by the Nazis. I might add it’s very easy to make presumptions, i.e. just assuming it would have been the same in Paris as it was in London, for example. But absolutely not. London was being bombed relentlessly for a start – Paris was not. London was making the best of rations and going without but its people were not starving…Parisians were starving. London was not occupied….a whole different mindset for its people than for everyday Parisians, who lowered their gaze as Germans passed by; some of them had to wear yellow stars. Britain was pulling together as a nation – its Londoners were especially plucky and looked after one another. France was divided geographically in the early days as well as emotionally by those who collaborated and those who opposed the occupiers. So these were all elements that affected the mindset of the French and the British; it was an education for me to wrap my thoughts around these aspects and to work out how to develop characters and where their starting ‘mindset’ was as I introduced them.
One of the best things I did was to hunt down a copy of the once-banned documentary called ‘The Sorrow and the Pity’ that takes a hard, frank look at the French Resistance, Vichy France and its collaboration with the occupiers. It allows the viewer to listen to the thoughts and ideals from people from all sides of the war equation in France – i.e. from the German Wehrmacht officers and their families to the maquisards who opposed them in rural France, to everyday Parisians…to the fascist idealists who welcomed the Nazi rule. The British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden is shown in archival interview footage giving his notions, as is the cunning British spymaker Maurice Buckmaster – who features in The Lavender Keeper – to everyday farmers …and even to Maurice Chevalier. It is an intriguing, deeply absorbing half day that I considered enormously well spent and highly educational. It makes an enormous difference to ‘walk in others’ shoes’ – which this doco permits – and as a result one gets a far better understanding of the times and how people were thinking and why they were taking certain paths.
Beyond that there was nothing else to do except get myself over to Paris quick smart (sigh, such a chore!) and walk around the streets to find my settings, research them, understand them.
Easter and a public holiday meant I had to fight the crowds during my visit to le Sacre Coeur, Montmartre, which has symbolic meaning to Lisette Forestier. She lives a short walk away.
Lisette Forestier – a key character – finds herself in Paris and I decided I would make her home in the 18tharondissement in Montmartre. I found a lovely, top floor flat, with shuttered doors and a tiny balcony just off the rue de l’Abbesses. It was perfect. Montmartre felt right for Lisette, high on its hill overlooking Paris and especially as I rather liked the idea of Lisette’s feeling of kinship toward the martyred nuns of the Sacre Coeur church.
Lisette's apartment in Montmartre
This area of Montmartre also had the right ‘villagey’ feel I wanted for Lisette so she gets to know the people around her. It’s not too far away from Quartier Pigalle – pronounced Pig-Al – which was the boozy, nightlife district of Paris that was made famous by the Moulin Rouge, Grand Guignol, as well as prostitutes, bars, cafes, etc. It was also the favoured area of artists, like Picasso, Dali and Lautrec as well as so many writers, where she could get lost in the friendly neighbourhood. The Allies called it ‘Pig Alley’. And to this day tourists flock from all over the globe to visit this district for nightlife activities.
I borrowed a lovely doorway that suited the 'feel of Lisette's apartmentfor their more adventurous nightlife.
Lisette’s friend, Wehrmacht Colonel Markus Kilian is a long way from Montmartre and I based him in the Hotel Raphael where so many of the middle to senior ranking Germans lived if posted to Paris. It’s a sumptuous, old, wood-panelled hotel on the Avenue Kleber, not far from Avenue Foch or German HQ in Paris and just off the Champs Elysees. It was perfect for Kilian, who likes to dine at the Paris Ritz, recently famous as Princess Diana’s hotel in Paris prior to her death, but where so many high ranking Germans lived during the Occupation. I walked through its glistening, mirrored hallways and admired its huge floral arrangements and fine furniture and furnishings and had to imagine how it may have looked in 1943 – and its famous L’Espadon restaurant – when we meet Kilian. It is in the Paris Ritz that Ernest Hemingway spent much of his war and I was glad to finally walk through the bar that takes his name and remains a famous watering hole in Paris.
The Ritz, Paris...a sparkling mirrored corridor. This hotel is where many of the German senior officers resided during the Occupation. Colonel Kilian in the novel dines here regularly.
The Hotel Crillon, where all the rich and famous stay these days in Paris, was home to the highest ranking officers and incidentally where most German officers, who were trapped in Paris during the liberation, holed up and waited for the Allies to arrive so they could surrender without being killed by a rampaging mob.
I took a walking tour of Paris that explained life under occupation and the bullet holes sustained in the buildings, including the Hotel Crillon, during the siege and liberation of the city seemed surreal for me as I was writing those very scenes at that time. When we walked through the Hotel Crillon, trying to look every inch like guests, Susan Hampshire was just strolling in with family members! I felt terribly famous and wanted to tell her how much I loved Monarch of the Glen but thought it intrusive! I walked on with contrived cool detachment. Overlooking the Place de la Concorde, this hotel has a magnificent position and little wonder that the Nazi top brass claimed it for their own lavish lifestyle while in Paris.
The lavish Hotel Crillon ballroom. No wonder the top Nazi officers made it their home. You wouldn't know a vast, noisy city throbs outside.
It sits at the gateway to the Champs Elysees but also to the gorgeous Tuileries that lead strollers into the palatial surrounds of the Louvre and further to Notre Dame Cathedral. This is a favourite walk of mine and a very long one, given that I’m usually coming from L’Opera on foot – but with lots of hot chocolate and chocolate macaron stops. Or, there’s always the beautiful Salon du Thé of the famous ‘Angelina’…a favourite haunt of Coco Chanel or more recently Audrey Hepburn and of course, Fiona McIntosh!
Just some of the goodies on offer at Angelina on Rue de Rivoli
I use the Rue Rivoli, the Tuileries, the Louvre, Jardin du Luxembourg, the neighbourhood of St Germain, and of course, Notre Dame Cathedral as major settings in the story, which gave me great pleasure as these are all favourite spots for me in the city.
Medici Fountain - gloriously cool, tranquil spot in the Jardin du Luxembourg and a meeting spot in the novel for Kilian and his colleague.
I could spend all day lounging around in the Jardin du Luxembourg, built by Marie de Medici in the 1600s, or sipping coffee at Les Deux Magots, a very important location in the story. This is one of the most famous cafes in Paris and was a popular watering hole for the Germans, who could afford to eat and drink while the rest of Paris starved. When I visited it, it was the height of summer and I considered myself very lucky to snare a tiny table amongst the chattering tourists. We shared our tiny table with an adventurous sparrow, determined to eat our snacks alongside us. The waiter kept shooing it away but we were more than happy for it to join us.
Our friendly Parisian sparrow at the most expensive cafe in town!
I will admit the hot chocolate (madness in summer, I know) was one of the most delicious on the planet and cost a cool fortune for the privilege. The café’s name of Les Deux Magots means two Chinese figurines and there is a literary prize named after it because this was also a favourite drinking place for academics, philosophers, artists and writers, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, et al.
The chinese figurines of Les Deux Magots
Ah, Paris! Look I could write an endless blog about the place. But I’ll stop here. If you’ve been, you’ll know why I could go on. If you haven’t…visit sometime – the city is gobsmackingly elegant and will surely steal your heart.
I will return readers to Paris in the sequel with some new locations around Gard du Nord and L’Opera. But that’s another blog!
