One of the fun things about writing books set in another place and time is the research I have to do. I know it's fiction but I am determined that everything should be right. I don't know about you, but if I come across something incorrect in a story, even if it's fiction, I can't go on with the book. If a character addresses someone with a title wrongly, calls the king "Your royal highness" instead of "Your majesty" for instance, then the spell is broken for me. The narrator becomes an unreliable guide and I put the book down (I have been known to throw it across the room if the mistake is really bad!)
So every time I go to England and Europe I have a long to-do list of things I need to check on or check out. I can walk around castles and go to museums but my favorite sort of research is the serendipitous kind. I had several opportunities like this in the past six weeks: I went to stay with close friends in Lincolnshire. I mentioned I needed to find someone who was an expert on the Blenheim Bomber aircraft from WW2 as my character has to fly one in my new book.
:You want to see old bombers"?" Roger asked me. "We've got the WW2 aircraft museum at an old airfield near here." So we drove to it and found.a giant hangar housing a Lancaster Bomber, various other planes, parachutes, uniforms, armored cars and... Most important of all, details of crashes and how the plane broke apart, how pilots baled out, and letters they wrote home to wives and sweethearts. Everything I needed to make my book authentic. We visited the old control tower, the chapel, a workshop where they were rebuilding other WW2 aircraft and then went to the bookstore to find books that might have diagrams of the aircraft I wanted. The woman serving in the store turned out to be a relative of the WW2 pilot whose family had started the museum.
"You want to know about the Blenheim, do you?" She asked. "You need to talk to Archie." And she brought a middle aged man across to me. It turned out he was THE expert. He answered every question I had had. Yes, the oxygen was incorporated in the helmet. And they wore a canvas flight suit over their flying jacket, and the pilot would have had to climb out through the cockpit roof and it did slide back.... My plane crash will be utterly authentic, thanks to Archie. And I have his email address in case something else comes up. How fantastic.
Then I was looking for a new stately home for Lady Georgie to live in. We went to visit an elderly relative AND she has moved into this fabulous property... Not the whole thing but has an apartment and shares the gardens and common rooms. So I got my property without having to work for it.
Sometimes my research leads me to a Lady Georgie moment (and you know how embarrassing things happen to her!) I had to check out churches to know where to set Georgie's wedding. (semi-spoiler alert... in case she gets married, I mean) I knew which one I wanted, actually a posh church in Mayfair where my sister in law had married, and we went to take pictures. When we arrived we heard singing. A mass was going on (Catholic church). We tried to creep in to the back but instead an imposing gentleman in a black suit insisted on ushering us into a pew. That's when we noticed everyone else was very well dressed, in black. We were in the middle of a posh funeral! And we could hardly get up and leave without being noticed. I was dying of embarrassment in my white jeans and T shirt and terrified that the mass would end and we'd be caught up in a crowd that asked us, "How do you know good old X?
We managed to tiptoe out as everyone stood for the final hymn and once safely outside I realized that crashing a funeral would be a fabulous scene for a future Georgie book!
So all those morons on Amazon who say in reviews that I know nothing, let me tell you how much research I really do! And how much I know
Does Accuracy matter to you, dear Reds? How hard do you work to get everything right? Have you had some serendipitous moments like this?
