Juliet Nicolson has fond memories of Charleston Festival.
She made her stage debut there with Virginia Nicholson, who had to explain to the audience the two were not related but had an unusual connection: Nicholson’s great-aunt slept with Nicolson’s grandmother.
A few in the Charleston audience might have been taken aback at the tale of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, but Nicolson has been back regularly since then.
Last year she interviewed playwright Michael Frayn, who wrote Noises Off and is married to author Claire Tomalin, a guest speaker at Charleston 2012. This year Nicolson is the interviewee. Biographer and journalist Lycett Green will grill her and Jessica Fellows, author of The World Of Downton Abbey, about the interwar period of the late 1930s.
After two historical novels, The Great Silence: 1918-1920 and The Perfect Summer: Dancing Into Shadow In 1911, the Sussex-based writer has made her first foray into fiction.
Abdication covers a shorter time span: January to December in 1936.
“I am very interested in people in extreme, dire circumstances, looking at people and how they live, rich or poor, men or women. So when it came to the third book, I thought maybe I could get closer by putting characters in the room with real people.
“I invented two main characters, one who lived just on the fringe of royal parties when it was year of the abdication, with Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII.
The other is a young woman who came to live with Jewish cousins in London during the time of Oswald Mosley causing terror to the Jewish community – it was the closest thing to us having a Nazi leader among us.
“I was interested in the contrast and balance of the extremes of these two lives and areas of society at that time, and did it through two imaginary characters.
So it’s a historical novel with as much factual accuracy as non-fiction, but I use fictional characters to walk through those doors.”
For research, she spent days in the basement of the London Library reading national newspapers front to back – from the headlines to the situations vacant.
She even took tea at Fort Belvedere house at Windsor Castle, where Ms Simpson and King Edward VIII had affairs.
“I got myself invited and I spent an afternoon wandering around this house I had already read all about – where they had these parties, where the king used to go down and have his steam bath – and I can remember the excitement of going to that place after I had nagged and begged to get in for a year.”
She also interviewed people who lived through the time, including JeremyHutchinson, who was 20 in 1936 and lives in the same village as her,astone’s throw from Charleston.
“He was the defence lawyer in the Lady Chatterley defence trial and is an amazing man.
“Ispenthours and hours talking to him about life in 1936 as a young man who was born into a prosperous family.
“At the age of 20 he became a socialist and the way he adapted to politics at the time was fascinating. He was so affected by unemployment and deprivation he saw when he went to the North, in the same year as Orwell.
“He was definitely an influence for my hero.”
Though it’s called Abdication, it’s not about the abdication. It’s about the noun, offing oneself from responsibility, not necessarily doing the right thing, rejecting it.
“Arguably, that’s what Edward VIII did and what a lot of other people at the time did too.”
Charleston Festival, Charleston House, Firle, Lewes, Sunday, June 3
Starts noon, tickets £13. Call 01273 709709 or visit charleston.org.uk
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