Back to her roots

Write what you know. That’s the advice often trotted out to writers of fiction, and much of what I write stems from my own life. When you’re telling a story, it’s helpful to focus on real places and people, even if they end up evolving quite differently as the book progresses. When I came up with the idea for my new novel, The Bookshop on Rosemary Lane, I needed my heroine, Della Cartwright, to have grown up in a fairly remote village. Setting it in Yorkshire felt right, as that’s where I spent my first 14 years.

I was born in a youth hostel just outside Malton, North Yorkshire, which my parents ran at the time. I remember the orchard, with its red and blackcurrant bushes, stretching down to the River Derwent. However, my clearest childhood memories are all centred around a tiny village called Goose Eye, near Keighley, where we moved when I was three.

Here, we village kids ran wild, swimming in the mill pond and playing in derelict mills with their perilous rotting floors and birds flying around inside. Goose Eye was a magical place to grow up.

Set in a deep valley with a river, woodland and dilapidated farm building to explore, it provided the setting for my childhood adventures. I wanted Della to have enjoyed a similar, free-range childhood in the village which gradually draws her back as an adult, when she is searching for a new direction in life.

My novel opens on the day that Della’s elderly mother Kitty dies. Kitty was a distracted and self-absorbed woman to whom Della never felt close. Only when they were cooking together did she feel accepted and valued by her mum. After Kitty’s death, when her possessions are being divvied up by the Cartwright offspring, all Della wants is her mother’s vast collection of cookbooks and she decides to open a cookbook shop, to bring food-lovers together.

I knew the shop should be in a village, but what started off as Goose Eye in my mind soon grew to encompass a collection of old-fashioned, independent shops. My childhood village was an altogether sleepier place; it wasn’t even on a bus route. In my story, I needed a village setting with more comings and goings than I remembered as a child.

However, Della’s home town, in nearby Heathfield, is based on Skipton – and I have hardly changed the details at all. I needed a Norman Castle – where Della works in the gift shop – and Skipton Castle fitted the bill perfectly. These days, kids are far more accustomed to being ferried around on day trips but back then, in the 70s, being taken anywhere was regarded as a fantastic treat. Skipton Castle, with its towers, dungeons and twisty staircases, seemed so spooky and mysterious.

As for the cookbook aspect, like Kitty I am an avid cookbook collector even though I had barely cooked a meal before becoming a mother myself. Then, armed with a couple of Jamie Oliver cookbooks, I started at the very beginning and knocked up a simple tomato sauce for pasta. I started to acquire more cookbooks.

These days, I cook for pleasure and even knock up the odd batch of cakes. I love leafing through the rather fragile 1950s Good Housekeeping cookbooks my grandma handed down to me. The simple recipes for scones and pancakes propel me back to those heady days of roaming around the West Yorkshire countryside.

The Bookshop on Rosemary Lane is published by Avon.