When I was checking details for my novel Box of Tricks I went to the Maritime Museum in Liverpool’s Albert Dock. In the story Nan wants to go to America to visit her son. I needed to know about the travel arrangements. How much did it cost to cross to America in the 1960s? What was the accommodation like? Were people allowed on board who were seeing their relatives off? How did they know when it was time to disembark, as the ship was about to set sail?
After much reading and digging around, I found all this out, but it was when I asked to see a box of memorabilia that I really began to feel the excitement of the voyage. I don’t think that box had been opened for decades. Inside were the actual luggage tags, still with their pieces of string attached. I was sure I could smell the smoke and the tarry oily scent of the journey across the Atlantic. It was only then I felt as though I could start to get inside the heads of those who set out from Liverpool on the ocean liners.
Sometimes research helps to fill in the gaps like that, lending authenticity. Other times one starts with browsing. I was browsing in Birmingham Library (since demolished) when I came across the story of the Shakespeare forgery in which Samuel Ireland persuaded the literary world that he’d found an undiscovered Shakespeare play! He was so taken up with its ‘success’ and so keen to impress his father, that he ‘found’ several more before being inevitably rumbled. What a great story. I turned it into a radio play.
