FICTION for NOW - with Lissa Evans

Lissa Evans finds inspiration for her novels in the spirit of ordinary people who lived through hard times

It might be assumed that working from home did not take on quite the radical new meaning for writers as it did for many others this year. Not so for author Lissa Evans, who arrived at the Library at 10am on the first day it reopened after lockdown on 6 July. Having the Library shut was “miserable”, she says. “I always work away from home.” She puts this down to poor concentration. The mere awareness of her husband, two children and dog are enough “external stimuli” to necessitate an escape, and The London Library has been a regular place to do so for the past 17 years. In this time Evans has written four acclaimed works of fiction and three children’s books. Her novels Their Finest Hour and a Half, about wartime movie-making (and itself made into a film), and Crooked Heart, about an evacuee experience, both brought to life the everyday antiheroics of wartime British life with huge charm and wit, and were long-listed for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her first novel, Spencer’s List, was written at home, she says. “But I was single then.”

She was also still working as a director, producer and script editor in television and radio, chiefly in comedy, directing episodes of Have I Got News for You and winning a BAFTA for the anarchic joy that is the Father Ted

television series, and an Emmy for political drama Crossing the Floor. In 2015, fiction took over. “I think I grew out of TV,” she laughs. “You go to the office and everybody’s 25 and looking terrified... It is fantastically stressful and writing’s a lot less so. It was me just getting lucky really.”

She came to the Library through a friend from comedy, author and scriptwriter John O'Farrell, and was hooked. “It's so lovely to work inside; it’s eccentric and endlessly fascinating,” she says. “And the serendipity of just going along the shelves and pulling out something that happens to catch your eye is always marvellous, both as a distraction and a research tool.”

Her historical settings, from wartime Norfolk to 1920s Hampstead, are drawn with a level of realism that feels effortless but clearly is not – it says something about the types of source material she seeks out. “I discovered in the Library basement a couple of years ago a collection of books which basically listed historical diaries and where they were kept. That was invaluable,” Evans says. “Also because I rely a lot for language on contemporary writing, the absolute gold dust is a book that is about the Second

V for Victory is out now published by Doubleday

World War and was actually published during it, so the fact that the spines in the fiction section give publication dates has been fantastic.”

More idiosyncratic sources include the Library’s collection of the Women's Social and Political Union magazine Votes for Women, which helped with her novel about the suffrage movement and its aftermath, Old Baggage; and “a tiny booklet” from 1945 by the Air Raid Wardens of Bromley, with “lots of detail on day-to-day activity at the end of the war. There are loads of books about the Blitz, but very few about what people were doing in 1944 or 1945, and yet London was under siege and thousands died from rocket bombs.” This fed into her newest book, V for Victory, which concludes a trilogy with characters from Crooked Heart and Old Baggage. Why does this period fascinate Evans? It started, she says, with a book given to her father when she was 13, called How We Lived Then: A History of Everyday Life During the Second World War by Norman Longmate. “He was the first to compile ordinary people’s memories,” she says. “And my dad didn't read it because, as he pointed out, he’d actually lived through the war so he didn’t need to be reminded! But I found it completely fascinating. It was things like, ‘What did you eat? What sweets were there? What did you get in your Christmas stocking? What was it like at school?’” She read the book so many times, “it gave me a sort of baseline of knowledge really, almost as if I had war memories of my own”. This particular past reality is always fascinating, she suggests, “because it was so hard, and so miserable, and so boring, and people worked incredibly hard and yet they were definably the same sort of people as we are. When you read their diaries and so forth, they moan just as much – they’re

people like us, but reacting with incredible gumption in a wildly abnormal situation.” For this reason, comparisons are drawn between that period and our current one. Evans says the key link is that “we don't normally have many mass experiences now, in which everybody is experiencing the same thing on the same day”.

In a newly opened Library, commonality is key for her. “It’s a social thing for me. I know a lot of people here and we go and have lunch together. So it’s my office.” The “new normal” future is, she says, looking bright because “the Library’s wonderfully well ventilated”. “My favourite desk currently is in the art department, overlooking White Cube gallery. It’s very good. You’ve got control of a window there.”