Where does the story for CANDY'S CHILDREN come from?

WAR WITHOUT MUMMY
Personal experiences during World War II

It's hard to understand what The War was like unless you were there. Thosse of us who were kids at the time thought the world was always going to be like that - bombs being dropped on us, ration books for our food and clothes, pig swill bins on the street corners, home made Christmas presents, parents suddenly disappearing. My sister and I were looked after by our grandmother while our father fought in the army in the Middle East, and our mother joined the WAAF. Our grandmother was Swiss and taught us to speak French even before we went to school. She looked after us very well, but she was often angry (I suppose I would be if I had the struggle she had to feed us every day). It wasn't the same as having Mummy at home.

MY FATHER'S STORY IN MY LATEST NOVEL
The real stories are great material for fiction

I was born in Palestine before WW2, when it was still an autonomous country, and hadn't been taken oveer by Israel. I am the eldest child of the son of a wealthy Liverpool fruit merchant and the daughter of an army officer.

My father represented his father's business in Palestine, buying and shipping oranges to Ireland and Liverpool. Because the couple were expecting their second child in 1939, they went back to Liverpool to stay with my father's family where the baby was born. They fully intended at the time to return to Palestine but when WW2 broke out it was deemed too dangerous - apart from the main thrust of the war in Turkey and Iraq, daily life in Palestine was increasingly punctuated by riots and more serious atrocities, as the Palestinian arabs tried to prevent the Jews from taking over their land. So my sister and our mother stayed in England for the durataion of the war while our father joined the army. When his superiors discovered that he could speak fluent Arabic he was sent back to the Middle East to join a special unit in Syria. My father wrote about all his adventures when he was an old man with an unquiet spirit. For a long while after his death I didn't read it, then I realised that if I didn't read what he had written, and if I didn't find a way of writing my version, the knowledge of the past would soon fade away. So I have used his story, and what my mother and grandmother told me about Palestine, and what I remember about the war days, to write my latest book, CANDY'S CHILDREN.