So my book STORM is out tomorrow, and this thread is about how it began. It starts with my grandfather, Tom Skinner. Here he when he was younger, standing next to my grandmother, whose nickname was Midge. (The magnificent turban, by the way, was her very glamorous solution ....

....of concealing her alopecia, partly brought on by being married to Tom, but that’s a whole other story.) Anyway. In the 1960s, Tom moved to a small village in Devon.

Back then, social circles were small, and you became friends with whoever you met in the pub. That’s how Tom became friends with Anthony Drewe. And it turned out that Anthony .....
lived in a castle, as you do. It was called Castle Drogo, right in the middle of Dartmoor.

Here’s a moody shot. I know.

Drogo (as I call it, to sound cool, and slightly like a character in Game of Thrones) was a rambling granite castle, with beautiful rooms, long stone corridors, and exceptionally leaky roofs. My dad grew very close to the Drewes, and when I was born Anthony became my godfather.

(bear with me. This really does relate to STORM. I'm not just wanging on about castles.) Our own family life was castle-less, and quite ordinary, but once in a while, my parents and brother and I would swap suburban Hertfordshire for deepest Dartmoor....

and I would play there. I remember the rocking horse in one of the corridors, a drop-down toilet that went on for ever that I was frightened of falling into, and the Wendy House in the woods, which I loved but was too small for my brother. I remember that Anthony was almost ...

Always wearing wellies, because he was always up on the roof, trying to fix it. He was closer to my grandfather’s age than my father’s, so as a godfather he remained a benevolent, kind, but ultimately distant man. He had a splendid moustache though, as this photo of us reveals:

The upkeep of the castle, unsurprisingly, became too much for the Drewes, and they eventually gave Castle Drogo over to the custodianship of the National Trust. On my last visit there, I noticed things were changing. The castle was part home, part tourist attraction.

My godfather and his wife retreated to one or two private rooms, and the rest of the castle was open to the public. I saw the ropes being put across the rooms, the notices telling people which way to walk, staff in the kitchen, making soup.

Once the Drewes passed away, the entire castle became a historic attraction. As the years passed, my time spent playing at Castle Drogo seemed too surreal to be true – as if it had happened to someone else. Three decades later, while I was doing the washing up, I had a ….

… vision, for want of a better word, of a child, watching in bemusement as tourists moved through her home, staring at everything as if they were exhibits. This became the genesis for STORM. There are no castles in the book – Frankie’s home is a cottage by the sea - but ….

…. there is a visitor’s book, lots of room ropes, room stewards, and plenty of leaky roofs, a detail that would hopefully make Anthony twirl his magnificent moustache and smile.

I’m fascinated with the idea of us putting our lives on display, deliberately or not. Frankie doesn’t have a choice, and struggles with the idea that strangers moving through her home get it all wrong. They make assumptions about her life.....

and believe that, because it was in the past, it is somehow not as rich, or complex, or special, as theirs.
BUT
There’s not a castle, council flat, caravan or cottage that will ever fully show the stories of the people who lived there.

Can a cramped kitchen truly tell the story of the people who once lived there, the love, imagination, or day-to-day heroism of their lives? Yet we make those snap judgements all the time; or I do, anyway. Houses may be homes, but they aren’t reliable narrators.

I find this slippery, hard-to-define relationship between home / evidence / people fascinating, especially in our culture where we put so much stock in where and how people live, and what their interiors look like.

(Or is this entire thread just my elaborate excuse for not cleaning my house? ABSOLUTELY NOT. HOW VERY DARE YOU.)

If you’ve got budding young writers at home, ask them – how would they feel if their homes got turned into tourist attractions in another century? What would the tourists notice, what assumptions would they make, and what would they get wrong, or right?

When you look at other people’s lives, basically, how easy is it to spot the truth?

Ps – the Wendy House that the Drewe children used to play in is still at the castle – as a display.

Gosh that was quite long in the end. Sorry about that. Does that count as my writing for the day? Yes, yes it does. *claps self.

Storm is out tomorrow. It took me ages. I cried a lot. I'm so proud of it. I couldn't have written it without
@nicklakeauthor patiently coaxing it into something better. I hope you like it. Thanks to everyone at @HarperCollinsCh - and @flaviasorr for her stunning cover.