Rachel Hore – Family Secrets & Lies

The Joys of Binge Reading

Rachel Hore is a UK Sunday Times bestselling author. whose latest book, The Hidden Years is the story of secrets, loss and betrayal set in Cornwall during World War ii, and then looking ahead closer to contemporary times, to the heady days of the 1960s.

Hi there. I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler, and today on the Binge Reading Show, Rachel talks about families and their secrets, and the strange coincidences when life mirrors art in ways we can’t possibly anticipate.

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Where to find links for this episode

Rose Tremain

https://www.penguin.co.nz/books/absolutely-and-forever-9781784745202

Ann Cleeves

The Shetland series:

https://anncleeves.com/shetland/index.html

The Vera series:

https://anncleeves.com/vera/index.html

Ann Patchett:

https://www.annpatchett.com/

Paul Harding

https://www.paulhardingauthor.com/

Where to find Rachel Hore Online

Website: https://rachelhore.co.uk/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RachelHoreAuthor/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rachel.hore/

Introducing women’s fiction author Rachel Hore

Rachel Hore – UK best selling author with over 1 million books sold

Jenny Wheeler: But now here’s Rachel. Hello there Rachel, and welcome to the show.

It’s great to have you with us.

Rachel Hore: Thank you, Jenny. It’s really good to be here.

Jenny Wheeler: Look, Rachel, I understand that The Hidden Years is your 13th novel,. Is that correct?

Rachel Hore: Yes it is. Unlucky for some, but I’m cheerful about it.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s great and it, they’re all in very much the same vein. You haven’t been one of those authors who’s jumped genres. They’re character, driven family stories of upheaval and secrets.

Sometimes cross-generational, sometimes not so much in the dual timeline. I wondered how you came to identify that as maybe the area that you were most interested in writing about in the beginning?

Love of family deep and long lasting

Rachel Hore: I think it came from quite deep inside. I’ve always been very interested in stories of my own family. My maternal grandmother was one of those sorts of grandmothers who was the repository of tales of characters in the family.

And, of all the things that had happened, good and bad, and who was guilty and who said what to whom and so on.

I became very fascinated by that, and although the first of my books, The Dream House, wasn’t about any real life family members, it was about family issues and family secrets which was my main motivation really.

Jenny Wheeler: I believe that every family has secrets. I’ve been a bit of an amateur genealogist myself in my time, and it’s amazing when you start to dig what you discover, isn’t it?

Rachel Hore: Yes it is. Some of these things might seem very ordinary, but when they’re happening in your own family, they are very special. Tt’s the old one, that blood is thicker than water. The links of family are very important.

But actually, people within families are always struggling to find their place, I think. If they’re the second child, they are struggling sometimes about their place in the family, when the eldest child might be the one that’s lionized most, or whatever.

It’s different in every family, but it is endlessly fascinating for those within the family, certainly, and sometimes if the stories are well told, to people outside the family as well.

Women finding a place of their own

Jenny Wheeler: That’s right. And I guess we also have to take into account how, what’s happening at the time.

The generational changes also affect the prospects. In The Hidden Years, I think you capture beautifully the two key female characters. The World War II one is very much taken up with her duties as a nurse, working with wounded soldiers.

By the time the book advances and the one from the 1960s is very typically caught up in that spirit of seeking freedom. Chucking in university and taking up with the musician boyfriend and going off to the country to something like a rather sedate sort of commune.

And in both timeframes, they’re young women searching for their place in life, their identity, what they’re meant to be doing, but in very different social circumstances, aren’t they?

Rachel Hore: I think you’ve put your finger on it. Really. The 1960s generation, of course, are the children of the Wartime Generation and for the Wartime Generation, duty and rationing and doing your bit were absolutely vitally important.

Whereas the next generation rather rebel against that and they’re looking for something different.

But in both generations, sometimes individuals don’t fit in exactly. And I suppose Belle in the 1960s, who’s very much searching for her place in the world, realizes that the search for freedom is perhaps not enough.

Lost family secrets going back a generation

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, that’s right. Belle, your 1960s protagonist, as we’ve mentioned, she’s chasing up family secrets, and it’s partly related to a country house called Silverwood, which happens to be the place she ends up with this new boyfriend.

She uncovers a photograph of herself as a toddler on the beach near Silverwood, and she has no recollection of being there.

She’s too young to really remember, and she’s very curious as to why this photograph exists and what connection the family has with the house.

Can you tell us a little bit about the nucleus for this story yourself? Was there a family photograph or something that sparked this idea?

Rachel Hore: There was something that sported the idea.

The story is set mostly in beautiful countryside in Cornwall at the mouth of the Helford River, which runs into the sea near the port of Falmouth on the south coast of Cornwall.

It’s a very beautiful area, but also an important area in World War II. especially when it came to D-Day.

The house of Silverwood, which is a fictional house, was home in the Second World War to an evacuated school. By the time Belle comes around in the 1960s, it’s become this home for this off-grid community.

What inspired it was finding a photograph in a book called Cornwall at War which I realized with a shock, showed a class of boys from a school that was evacuated to Cornwall during the Second World War.

The serendipity of coincidence

And it was the school that my father was at. I poured over this photograph wondering which of the boys might be my father. In fact, none of them was, it

My next board of call was to actually write to the school and say, do you have any other photographs of this house where the school was evacuated to?

I was sent one and I was told that my father was in this photograph somewhere. I couldn’t actually identify him in the lines of, boys in the class, the year photograph.

But it gave me a very warm feeling to think that he was there. And it really engendered the family story. My Father’s school was evacuated to a hotel on the south coast of Cornwall. But I chose to invent a house for my purposes.

Jenny Wheeler: Was your dad not alive still? For you to be able to talk with him about that directly?

Rachel Hore: Sadly not. One of the things in the story that did amaze me though, was the fact that, in the part of the story in Truro, which is the capital of Cornwall, the county capital.

The girl in the past whose name is Imogen, is a nurse in a hospital there and a German bomb is dropped on the hospital.

And when my mother read the book, she said, “oh, your father always talked about that bomb.”

Then I realized it was in the school holidays, he would actually have been living at home a few hundred meters up the road from the hospital and he would’ve heard it go off and so on.

So that really gave me trickles at the back of my neck to think of that strong connection.

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The Beautiful Spy – based on real life

Jenny Wheeler: Yes.

Rachel Hore: When you are writing fiction, how close it sometimes gets to reality.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, that’s wonderful. That’s amazing. A couple of books before The Hidden Years, you wrote one called The Beautiful Spy, and a similar story really, of a young woman of that generation who wants to feel she’s making a difference in the world.

She doesn’t want to have the traditional unquestioned pathway of marriage and family, just immediately.

She wants to at least explore her options and she’s drawn into accepting a rather risky assignment, working as a spy in Britain before the war to the precursor for MI 6, MI 5.

I gather that Minnie, your character is based on a true story.

Could you tell us a little bit about that particular woman and that story?

Rachel Hore: I call her Minnie Gray, and she is based on a real life woman called Olga Gray, who in 1932 was recruited by the Secret Service to spy on the British Communist Party.

I came across Olga when I was actually researching an idea for another book I wanted to write, another novel I wanted to write, which ended up going onto the back burner, because I was looking for a wartime spying story as a backstory for, the outline I was working on.

And I came across the story of Olga in a biography of the spy master M, who started off the Secret Service at this time.

It was not a story I’d ever heard before. We’ve heard quite a lot about the Special Operations Executive, the SOE, and the women who were recruited to go to Europe during the Second World War who were wireless operators and couriers, sometimes at the risk of their lives.

We’ve had a great deal about them. But this story from a dozen years before the Special Operation Executive really pulled me in because the early thirties you think of as quite a sedate time really.

A very different side of spies from Bond

And although we’re always thinking about the gradual rise of Hitler. in the late twenties, early thirties until the time he becomes chancellor in 1933, in fact, the workings of the British Communist Party were of at least as great interest to the British government as anything to do with fascism.

And there was a very real fear that went back to the 1917 Russian Revolution that Russian communism might cause revolution in other European countries, especially Britain.

And as a result of that M – Maxwell Knight – was charged with investigating the British Communist Party and he considered the best way of doing this was to send very quiet, unassuming people like Olga in as administrators, and secretaries to sit there quietly, typing letters but keeping their ears open for what was going on in the British Communist Party offices.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, it’s a very different side of the spy industry to what we might imagine from James Bond.

A most unglamorous side and, but it brings out extremely well the emotional conflict that the situation gave rise to because, Minnie in your book starts to feel a real conflict between her growing relationships with the people she’s working with, the friends, and her handler at MI5, who she really looks up to and wants to please.

But she feels she’s betraying the people that she works for.

How did you get inside August’s head? Did she leave memoirs or did you have to imagine all of that? Part of the story.

Real life Olga had a happy ending

Rachel Hore: Maxwell Knight himself wrote an account of what’s happened in these years. Although he didn’t write anything that, condemned his own behavior, he very much gave the impression of Minnie as – oh, sorry – Olga, real life – Olga – as somebody who was under considerable psychological pressure. There was evidence of her having to be admitted to a nerve hospital at least once, because the pressure on her was so great.

It was a matter really of me inserting myself into the information that there actually is, and thinking what it actually must have been like for quite an ordinary young woman in these circumstances.

Especially, I don’t know, I think, I hope she comes across as quite a strong character with a lot of stamina.

She was not somebody who was frightened off by the least sign of danger. She was actually up for all sorts of things, such as being sent out to India on her own without a chaperone into quite a dangerous situation where she was supposed to meet Indian communists and handover information and money.

Although she found it incredibly stressful doing it, she did get on and do it. You’ve got this dichotomy really. Someone who was incredibly brave but at the same time suffered terrible stress because of doing the things that she was required to do.

And I’m not sure that anybody’s written about a spy quite like that before, certainly in fiction.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, I think you’re right. And that does come through?

She certainly doesn’t appear to be weak to me, but she does appear to be put under really unfair levels of stress, and you get the feeling of some of the stories we’ve heard in more recent times about undercover cops being put into very difficult positions and then not being given adequate support.

With your character, you feel as if she is not given adequate support by MI 5. I’m not sure whether her handler in your story is the equivalent of Maxwell Knight or one below him. We are never quite clear what exact level in the service he is.

M for Maxwell – complicated spymaster

Rachel Hore: He is Maxwell Knight.

Jenny Wheeler: He is Maxwell Knight. Yes.

Rachel Hore: Yes. Who is the model for M in at the James Bond stories?

Jenny Wheeler: He comes across as a very attractive man, but gradually you realize that there’s quite a degree of manipulation going on there.

She almost worships the ground he walks on, and the most important thing to her is to both serve her country but not fail him.

And she extends herself probably way beyond what she really needed to try and fulfill that.

Then sadly, she gets, I don’t want to leave any spoilers, but she isn’t given adequate support.

Rachel Hore: No, he himself is somebody who had various psychological ticks, which meant that he really put himself first.

He was a very manipulative man. He was manipulative of women. He was very good at charming women.

He was probably an unacknowledged homosexual, but that didn’t stop him marrying several times.

A very complicated character. Although he said on paper that he was supporting his spies and he certainly did regularly meet up with Minnie and with Olga and, in some respects did his best to support her, but he was always egging her on to the next thing.

And when push came to shove at the end, and he had basically had what he wanted out of her in terms of the brief he had been given. then he did abandon her. And she never really forgave him for that.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. I thought one of the clever things about the way you handled the story was that two thirds, three quarters of the way through, right the way through, really, you felt this sinking feeling of how is this poor girl ever going to have a good end from this.

Real life Olga had a happy ending

When she’s forced to confront the people that she was very fond of in the courtroom, for example.

You feel so sorry for her, but you give her a great, happy ending, which we won’t spoil. But I hope Olga also got her happy ending. Did she?

Rachel Hore: That the ending in the book is based on the real life ending, if that cheers you up.

Jenny Wheeler: Oh, it does.

Rachel Hore: I was very careful not to give her a fairytale ending. It isa happy ending for her, a new life and so on.

But I didn’t want to make it all into something chocolate boxy.

Because it wasn’t, and, you can tell from the prologue, I guess from the very beginning that what had happened to her as a spy was something that was never going to leave her.

She was scared for the rest of her life.

Jenny Wheeler: I think we have referred earlier to the fact that you were an editor with a big publishing house.

I actually can’t remember if we’ve referred to that already or not?

Rachel Hore: No. Harper Collins, in London.

Jenny Wheeler: How did you make the switch from editing to writing? I’m sure people would be interested to know that. How many years were you editing?

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How Rachel Hore got into writing fiction

Rachel Hore: I was in publishing for about 18 years. I started with another publishing company for two or three years, and then I moved to Harper Collins.

It wasn’t Harper Collins then, but it became Harper Collins. I was working on fiction. I was working with a range of authors, very many authors of what we tend to call women’s fiction such as Barbara Erskine and Sydney Sheldon and Susan Howatch.

And a lot of what was slightly disparagingly called ‘chick lit authors.’

When it came to, around about the millennium, 2000. I was by then married and I I was having my third child.

And at the same time, my husband, who is also a writer, but was also employed as a copywriter, in a big company, he went freelance.

We looked at each other and we thought ‘do we want to go on working under this pressure, both of us with three children and London house prices and blah, blah, blah?’

We elected to move out of London. To do the big downsize. When we moved to Norwich, where he came from and where there was a family network and it has been a very happy move.

But it left me not quite sure of who I was and what I was doing.

I’d not been a full-time mother before. And I knew I wanted to keep doing something that was for me and earned a bit of money always useful.

And writing was just one of a number of things that I started trying to do, and it was one of the things that happened to work out.

I was writing the type of novel. That I wanted to write, but I also knew that it was the sort of novel that people wanted to read.

And it was a fairly straightforward job to find an agent in that I knew I knew which people, I had a very short list of people I thought would be interested in the kind of book I was writing.

A lucky break turned into one million sales

But that didn’t necessarily mean that somebody wanted to publish the book. My agent sent it out to quite a number of editors and there were an awful lot of ‘no’s’.

But then there was a resounding yes from Simon and Schuster. I joined their list and 13 books later, I am still with them, with the same editor, which is quite unusual these days.

And I’m very grateful for it.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. That’s fantastic. You’ve earned that magic tagline Sunday Times Best Seller, which in the UK is, printed gold. I imagine. Was there one particular book that was the breakthrough book for you? How has your career gone from the beginning?

Rachel Hore: I think quite often, you need a little bit of luck, a little bit of a break. And it was the fourth book that happened with, A Place Of Secrets. That was picked by the Richard and Judy show for their for their promotion.

It was past the days when they had a television chat program, but they’re teamed up with W.H. Smith and between them, they all sold a lot of copies and that made a huge difference to the sales of my books.

Although that particular book didn’t actually get onto the Sunday Times Bestseller list, the next one, A Gathering Storm did. Then the subsequent ones, most of them did as well.

I’ve now sold over a million copies of my books and it somehow has all worked out very well.

Jenny Wheeler: That sounds wonderful. A wonderful break. Obviously, the fact that you were known to them probably helped in the sense that they knew you had such a sterling background in editing and writing beforehand, but that’s fantastic.

You have also been doing some teaching, haven’t you, at the University of East Anglia.

What do you find with your students, and what advice would you give new writers starting out?

Reading as important as writing for authors

Rachel Hore: That was something I started doing shortly after I moved to Norwich. I was approached by a member of staff there who was very anxiously looking for someone to teach a publishing module.

That’s something I took on and did for a number of years, branching out to teach creative writing once I myself had started writing and felt confident enough to dare to teach it to other people.

They were very talented, a lot of the students that I was teaching. Some of them wanted to run before they could walk, which is quite natural.

The creative writing courses at the University of East Anglia are taught very much within the context pf the critical eye, by which I mean that reading existing works is very much part of the curriculum.

To be able to read other people’s books and critique them and respond to them as a writer is the approach there. And I think that advice carries on very clearly to anybody who is seeking publication to read other people’s books.

Not from the point of view of wanting to copy anybody, but writing and reading is one great, big conversation.

I find all the time while I’m reading for pleasure that I’m noticing how things are done successfully or otherwise.

Things tick off other things in my own mind and send me down little rabbit holes, with my own writing and I find reading other authors very inspiring for my own writing. So that is my main piece of advice for a writer.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s great and that leads nicely onto a question that I like to ask everyone, and that is, what are they liking to read?

This is The Joys Of Binge Reading. Many of our listeners will be the Whale Readers who read a lot of books. Would you like to give some recommendations for recent books that you’ve read that you think they might enjoy?

What books has Rachel Hore been reading?

Rachel Hore: Yes, I should say I try to read quite widely, not necessarily in a particular genre.

I’m sent a lot of book proofs by publishers, of authors books writing in a similar genre to my own. And I’m very glad to do that and to respond sometimes giving quotes for covers.

I like to read a wider range of books than that. So recently, for instance, I’ve read Rose Tremain’s latest, which is Absolutely And Forever, which a story of adolescent unrequited love which is beautifully written and funny and not very long. It’s a delight to read.

An author I will always read the next book of one example of this is the Crime writer Ann Cleeves. I’m a great fan of the Shetland and the Vera books. And then there’s another line that she sets in Devon in the UK. I love the American author, Ann Patchett and her books.

I always read her, some I like better than others, but hey ho.

What else have I read recently? I’ve read one of the books on the Booker shortlist, which is by Paul Harding, This Other Eden, which is a very unusual story. I am trying to read more widely and I like reading nonfiction as well especially history.

And one of the pleasures of writing my own books is the amount of history I can read as part of my research that’s always delightful.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. That leads on nicely to the next question that I like to ask. Looking back down the tunnel of time, if there was one thing in your own creative career you’d changed, what would it be?

Rachel Hore: I’ve spent an awful lot of time being worried about my writing and will the books work out? Will they be published properly and so on. Sometimes I feel I haven’t stopped to enjoy the whole process enough.

I think enjoyment of reading and writing well, it’s what? We do it sometimes, I don’t know, to fill time.

We do it educationally and so on. But I think above all we need to enjoy what we’re doing. I’m not at the school who thinks, for instance, because you’ve started a book, you’ve got to finish reading it. Yeah, I think that business of enjoyment.

What is next for author Rachel Hore?

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. That’s great. What is next for Rachel as author, what have you got on your desk over the next 12 months? Let us know. You’ve probably got one coming out soon and you might be starting to think of the next one. I’m not quite sure how your timetable at Simon and Schuster to work.

Rachel Hore: I am 65,000 words into the writing of another book which doesn’t yet have a title and which has to be delivered in the spring sometime, so I better get on with it. I started that in about May or June, I think last May or June. I’m only really getting the word count going now.

Jenny Wheeler: Can you give us a little hint about what anything to do with the setup for that run.

Rachel Hore: Yes, it’s inspired by the story of my mother and my aunt who are twins. They’re now 93, but they were both women scientists in the 1950s and had very hair-raising experiences, working in what was very much a man’s world.

I interviewed them both separately to write down their stories and so on.

So that was a sort of starting point for a book, which is about some women in science.

It’s not in the least bit like Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Gomez, which has done so amazingly well.

But perhaps it will provide another perspective for readers. I’ve got the paperback of The Hidden Years coming out in February here in the uk.

Otherwise, I’m still doing events for The Hidden Years. So that book is very much in my mind to talk about it. Literary festivals and so on. The rest of the year I don’t know, I gave up the teaching because I felt I wasn’t getting much of a life outside work.

My children are now grown up and I like to try and visit them as much as possible. And I like to see more of my friends, and but I’m also always on the lookout for something new to try. Travel new place, find new things to join and so on.

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Rachel Hore – trying new places and interests

Jenny Wheeler: So what are some of the recent new things you’ve joined or traveled that you’ve undertaken? Have you got anything more recent?

Rachel Hore: We’re going to Copenhagen in February, which should be nice, maybe a bit chilly. I sing in choirs. I’m going on a gardening course. We have a garden but I’m not a very proficient gardener. I want to pick up a few tips.

Jenny Wheeler: Sounds good. I’m not sure with Simon and Schuster being published in that traditional way, whether they emphasize as heavily as the indie authors do about relating, interacting with your readers online. But do you interact with readers online and where can they find you online?

Rachel Hore: I’m on Facebook. I have a page, but I also am there as an individual if you like. Just with my name, Rachel Hore. I’m on Twitter. I’m on Instagram, and I have put my name up on a couple of the new platforms. Threads and Blue Skies, but I haven’t really got grips with how they work yet.

But I also have a website with a contact form and emails that people send via that come straight into my inbox.

I had a lovely experience on Monday, slightly grumpily getting up on a Monday morning opening my laptop and there was a lovely email from a lady in Australia who said she’d just read one of my books and really loved it. She talked about it for a while and it really set me up for the day, hearing from her.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s absolutely lovely, and I can confirm that you answered very promptly because I used that form to set up this meeting. It was just fantastic. You’re very reachable there.

We’ll have all those links in the show notes for this episode. When it goes online, there’ll be a transcript of this word, this pa, this interview for people who don’t particularly want to listen to a podcast.

So it’ll all be there as evergreen material forever more.

Where to find Rachel Hore online

Rachel Hore: Wow. This is a wonderful endeavour, Jenny. Thank you so much. And you must work so hard to do this and help so many people.

Jenny Wheeler: Look, it’s great of you to acknowledge that because it does actually take quite an investment of time, and I must say this year I’ve decided to make it fortnightly rather than weekly for that very reason.

Because I was feeling it was consuming rather a lot of time. But it is such a pleasure to have the chance to meet and talk with people like you, Rachel.

So that’s the payback for me. It really is. Thanks so much for being on the show.

Rachel Hore: Thank you very much for asking me. And, I do hope that your audience enjoy the interview.

Jenny Wheeler: Thanks. And we’ll look forward to the science story. So you will be turning that into a fully fictionalized version, won’t you?

Rachel Hore: Oh, yes. As I say, I’m 5,000 words into it now. And it should be published next spring, in Spring next year. Roundabout March, February, March 25.

Jenny Wheeler: Thanks so much.

Rachel Hore: Thank you, Jenny.

Jenny Wheeler: Bye for now.

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That’s on the next episode of Binge Reading in two weeks time.

Remember, if you enjoy the show, leave us a review so others will find us too. Word of mouth is still the best way for others to discover the show and great books they will love to read.

That’s it for this week. Catch you next time and meanwhile, Happy Reading.