Book Blurb:
The Girl from Summerhayes
1914, England. Will her decision unite her family or tear them apart?
Surrounded by beautiful gardens in the glorious Sussex countryside, Summerhayes House seems like a true hidden paradise, but behind its polished floors and perfect green lawns is a family divided. The Summer family’s beloved home is under threat, and nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Summer finds herself caught in the heart of the crisis.
Elizabeth’s father believes his daughter marrying well will save Summerhayes. But Elizabeth is distraught at the stifling future ahead of her. A chance meeting with green-eyed Aiden Kellaway, the handsome architect’s apprentice working on the estate’s prized gardens, changes everything. For the first time, Elizabeth pictures an entirely different life, and – despite her father’s wishes – she is determined to take hold of it.
But war is brewing in Europe, and when its long shadow touches Summerhayes, Elizabeth realises her rebellion will come at a price. Desperately torn between family loyalty, society’s expectations and the bright chance at happiness she glimpsed in Aiden’s arms, she is forced to make an impossible choice.
As Elizabeth’s future – and her family’s – hangs in the balance, she must ask herself, is the price worth paying? And can she live with the consequences?
The Secrets of Summerhayes
1944, England.A chance meeting with a soldier unravels a long-buried family mystery…
England is in the devastating grip of World War Two, and Bethany Merston’s life changes in an instant when bombs screech down over London. Heartbroken, she leaves the shattered ruins of her home behind. In the Sussex countryside, she takes a job as companion to elderly Alice Summer, mistress of the crumbling and over-grown Summerhayes House.
Its once-pristine grounds are now home to a regiment of soldiers preparing for an invasion across the channel. But Bethany’s wartime experiences mean she can find beauty in broken things, and she is captured by the estate’s magic. When she meets handsome, blue-eyed Lieutenant Jos Kerrigan in the gardens one morning, it is clear he has also been captivated by Summerhayes. As their friendship grows, Bethany realises that it’s not just the house she’s falling for…
But something is stirring beneath the surface at Summerhayes… When Bethany discovers that Alice is receiving anonymous letters that have opened up old family wounds, she is determined to find out who is responsible. Convinced that Summerhayes itself holds the key to the mystery, Bethany and Jos explore the grand house together.
The answers lie in a long-forgotten painting in the dusty attic, unravelling the mysteries of the Summer family. And as the truth about Alice’s past comes to light, it has the power to change Bethany’s future.
Will Bethany and Jos’s blossoming love survive the war, or will the secrets of Summerhayes tear them apart?
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Author Bio:
Bestselling author Merryn Allingham was born into an army family and spent her childhood on the move. Unsurprisingly, it gave her itchy feet and in her twenties she escaped an unloved secretarial career to work as cabin crew and see the world. The arrival of marriage, children and cats meant a more settled life in the south of England, where she’s lived ever since. Having gained a PhD, she taught university literature for many years and loved every minute of it. What could be better than spending one’s life reading and talking about books? Well, writing them perhaps.
Six Regency period romances followed, then those itchy feet kicked in. The Regency was abandoned and Daisy's War, a wartime trilogy, found its way to the top of the Amazon charts, followed by the Summerhayes books—a saga of romance and intrigue set in the Sussex countryside during the summers of 1914 and 1944.
But itchy feet never rest and in 2020 she finally went over to the dark side! The crime series, the Tremayne Mysteries, is set in locations around the world and features Nancy, a feisty 1950s heroine, turned amateur sleuth.
Keep in touch with Merryn via the web:
Website: https://www.merrynallingham.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/MerrynWrites
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/merrynwrites
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Author Interview:
What literary pilgrimages have you gone on?
I’m not sure you’d call it a literary pilgrimage, but I once read Wuthering Heights with a group of sixth formers on the moors above Haworth, wearing kagoules and sheltering beneath anything we could find! The one that still haunts my memory, though, was to Max Gate, the house Thomas Hardy built on the outskirts of Dorchester. I’d been several times to Bockhampton, the cottage where he was born, and to his grave in Stinsford churchyard—his heart is buried there while his body is in Westminster Abbey. But the Max Gate visit was special. Because I’d written my PhD thesis on Hardy with a copy in Dorchester Museum, I was given special access to the top floor of the house. Seeing the bedroom of his estranged wife, Emma—a cold, narrow cot in a monk-like cell—brought home vividly what their later years together must have been like and why perhaps Hardy wrote such magnificent poetry following her death, an outpouring of love, grief and remorse.
If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?
To be kinder to myself. Having spent years teaching some of the greatest prose ever written, I found it hugely daunting when I first put pen to paper. Constantly self-censoring, there was a mocking voice in my head telling me not to bother. In the end, I managed to accept that I was never going to be Virginia Woolf, but instead could be me. The words began to flow and being me turned out to be fun! Realising I had an authentic voice took me far too long to discover, though it’s probably the most important thing a writer can learn: my background, personality, reading, all played a part, but my voice was mine alone.
How did publishing your first book change your process of writing?
My first book was a Regency romance—in all, I wrote six Regency novels under the name of Isabelle Goddard. Writing category historical romance proved a great apprenticeship but left me wanting to work on a larger canvas in more mainstream fiction. It also left me wanting to create something a little darker. It hadn’t escaped my notice that with each succeeding Regency, the mystery element of the novels had become more pronounced. It seemed a natural progression then to segue into writing historical mystery, but still with an element of romance. In 2013, I adopted a new writing name—Merryn Allingham—and launched myself into the new genre.
What kind of research do you do, and how long do you spend researching before beginning a book?
I enjoy researching a great deal: delving into history where I live in different houses, wear different clothes, meet different people and confront different choices. For The Girl from Summerhayes, I undertook several months of research to add to what I already knew of the period, reading up on the social history of the country house, for instance, plotting the timeline of the First World War, understanding the pressures that led to emigration. Social unrest in the country was a huge topic—the Suffragettes’ campaign for the vote, the fight by trade unions over workers’ pay and conditions, and across the Irish sea, the struggle for Irish independence. Important too were social attitudes: to women, to Jews, to ‘foreigners’ generally. The book is set in the summer of 1914, a cataclysmic moment for this country, and I feel a deep attachment to the world that was lost then. The First World War affected millions of lives across every class and community, with so few understanding the reality of the war they were called to join.
For the second book in the series, The Secrets of Summerhayes, I had a wealth of material from the Second World War from which to choose. I read graphic accounts of what it felt like to live through the Blitz, mugged up on rationing statistics and wartime restrictions on travel, read widely on the militarisation of southern England with its influx of servicemen from different parts of the world. I spent several months exploring this world—knowing when to finish and begin writing was the main problem!
Do you read your book reviews? How do you deal with bad or good ones?
I’ve been very lucky in having nearly all my books published and over the years have attracted a great many reviews, mostly I’m delighted to say good ones. Whether it’s a publisher rejecting the book you love or a bad review from a reader, it’s hard, but as a writer you put yourself up to be judged—it comes with the territory. It’s best either not to read reviews at all, or if you do, to remind yourself that it’s not you personally that’s being rejected, but your story. Writers put so much of themselves into their work, though, that it can be difficult. It’s as well that the good reviews far outstrip the uncomfortable ones!
What is the most difficult part of your artistic process?
I would say it’s getting the initial ideas down on paper or rather on screen. I wouldn’t want to plot the novel chapter by chapter—that way I’d lose the excitement of not quite knowing where the story was going—but I have to feel certain of where I’m starting and where I hope to finish, with maybe a few scenes in my mind of how to get there. These can change, of course, characters can refuse to ‘fit’ my early ideas, in which case, all I can do is go with the flow. Once I have the skeleton of a story, fleshing it out, seeing it bloom and flourish, is immensely pleasurable.
Tell us about your novel/novels/or series and why you wrote about this topic?
It was a single image that lodged in my mind and set me writing the first of the Summerhayes books. I’d made a memorable visit to the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall. Over the past few years, the gardens had gradually been rescued from complete desolation and were still being restored. In their heyday in the late Victorian/Edwardian eras, their several owners had spent a huge amount of time, money and effort in creating a veritable paradise. But in 1914, war came to England, and everything changed.
On one particular day that summer, every gardener on the estate had downed tools together and walked side by side to Redruth, to enlist at the local recruiting centre. Most of those men, if not all, were to perish in the mud of Flanders. The Day Book, which should have listed every job done, carried only the date that day and poignantly was never used again. With the loss of so many, it proved impossible to maintain the gardens and they slowly succumbed to the ravages of nature until they were rediscovered, ‘a sleeping beauty’, some thirty odd years ago.
The image of those men, honourable and courageous, walking together to enlist in what they saw as a just cause, stayed in my mind, and I knew I had to record that moment in a novel. My fictional estate, Summerhayes, is nestled in the Sussex countryside, rather than Cornwall but like Heligan, it faces the threat of a war that looms ever closer. It also faces threats nearer to home. The daughter of the house, Elizabeth, is at odds with a society based on rigid gender and class divisions. Having struggled unsuccessfully to become a professional artist, she is now forced to fight against her family’s choice of husband. Her adolescent brother, William, already a disappointment to his father, must confront his true sexuality. And a long-running feud with the Summers’ neighbours, fuelled by money and jealousy, intensifies to breaking point. As the sweltering heat builds to a storm, Elizabeth, her family and household, face danger on all sides. The summer of 1914 will change everything for them, as indeed it did for so many.
What was your hardest scene to write?
The discovery by one of my characters in A Tale of Two Sisters that her younger sister, Lydia, is finally lost to her. I’d become so involved with these two wonderful but very different women that I cried over the keyboard as I had Alice discover the terrible secret.
What is your favourite line or passage from your own book?
I have a lot of favourites, but maybe I should quote from the beginning of The Girl from Summerhayes, since it sets the scene for the conflict that will destroy a seeming paradise.
Her father’s voice ripped the silence apart. It burst through the closed doors of the drawing room, swept its way across the hall and rattled the panelled walls of golden oak. From where she stood on the staircase, the girl could just make out his figure shadowed against the room’s glass doors. A figure that was angry and pacing. Carefully, she made her way down the last remaining stairs, then tiptoed to a side entrance. The air was fresh on her skin, cool and tangy, the air of a glorious May evening. A sun that had shone for hours still lingered in the sky and a few birds, unsure of when this long day would end, continued their song.
Elizabeth Summer walked purposefully across the flagged terrace and down the semi-circular steps to an expanse of newly mown grass. Its scent was enticing, and she had to stop herself from picking up her skirt and dancing across the vast lawn. It was relief that made her feel that way, relief that she’d escaped the house and its hostility.