A Question of Trust: A Novel
Penny Vincenzi
For the Magnificent Nine: William, Jemima, Ollie, Honor, Grace, Ellie, Niamh, Samuel and Beth: my grandchildren.
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments are really thank you letters – a record of extremely heartfelt gratitude to all the people who have helped to create a book, to give it interest and colour, and to make the characters creatures of substance, with ambitions and passions beyond the personal. And writing them is to travel through the book again, from beginning to end, and realise what a journey of discovery it has been.
In writing A Question of Trust, I have relied hugely on many people, kind, generous people, all hugely knowledgeable in their fields, who gave me their time and attention and I really do thank them from the bottom of my heart.
From the very outset, I was lucky enough to have a brilliant and fascinating ally in Barbara Hosking, former Whitehall ‘Spin Doctor’ with an encyclopaedic memory, an ongoing passion for politics and, as a very welcome bonus, a brisk sense of humour about the political scene. She worked for such mighty legends from the forties and fifties as Harold Wilson, Nye Bevan, and Barbara Castle and the hours I spent either with her or reading her emails were both awesome and immense fun. She was also very helpful in creating situations for me that my hero, Tom Knelston, might find himself in, thus extending the plot neatly more than once. I quite simply could not have written the book without her.
I was led to Barbara by the redoubtable Sue Stapely – no stranger to my acknowledgment pages! – who also contributed on the political front, having not only been a political candidate in the eighties, but Head of PR at the law society. She proved as always a rich source of knowledge on both political and legal procedures and on the divorce process in the fifties – astonishingly different from today.
And Lorraine Lindsay-Gale, County Councillor for many years, who gave me a nail-biting description of the tension of polling day – and The Count!
For information on the medical front, I was incredibly fortunate to find one Professor Harold Ellis, (still lecturing on anatomy as he marches briskly through his nineties – he says it keeps him young) who was actually working for the NHS on the day it was launched. His memories of that day and indeed those preceding it, and his life as a young surgeon, were totally fascinating.
I was introduced to him by another doctor, Anthony Rossi, retired consultant plastic surgeon and lifelong personal friend; he dredged his considerable memory and introduced me to a medical condition, absolutely crucial to the plot, of which I had never heard, patiently explaining it to me in all its complexity at least three times.
I met Dr Herbert Barrie, a paediatrician in the fifties, working at Great Ormond Street among other places and whose stories of caring for sick children then were both moving and fascinating. He has, very sadly, now died; but the morning I spent with him, hearing of his work and the passion he felt for it, is still a most vivid and happy memory.
Professor Ray Powles CBE, the distinguished Head of Haemato-Oncology at the Cancer Centre London, gave me a most hilarious account of his days as a medical student in the fifties and a slightly more sober one of his early days as a doctor; I could have listened all day, and actually did for several hours.
I must also thank most profoundly Alexandra Annand, who hostessed a wonderful tea party for me and two ladies who had trained at St Thomas’s Hospital from 1947 onwards. Their stories were absolutely riveting, right from their very first day, under the iron rule of Sister, (prayers in the ward at eight sharp, probationers having cleaned polished and ‘hot dusted’ first). Alexandra herself trained at Thomas’s in the sixties, rising in rank to Night Sister in the seventies. Her stories were equally fascinating; I might have to write another book, just to accommodate them! This one would have been much the poorer without her help.
Then huge thanks also to Walter Merricks CBE, former Chief Ombudsman, who was so helpful in giving me background into the life and training of a young solicitor taking his articles in those far-off days, as he lunched me most generously in the splendid Law Society building in Chancery Lane.
And many thanks to Sheila Sharp, old friend from the same girls’ grammar school as me in Totnes, South Devon, who provided invaluable background information on grammar school entry, in those far-off days.
Immense help on the military front; Christopher White-Thomson, another lifelong friend, recounted wonderfully vivid stories from his military family archives of the taking of Monte Casino, and the events surrounding it.
Two of the old soldiers I met wished to remain anonymous, but I am able to thank one beloved old friend, Neil Mills, who recounted in enormous detail and with great relish, tales of his war experiences in a series of torpedo boats in both the Atlantic and the Med, two of which he commanded. Neil has, very sadly, died now, and I miss him a lot; and deeply regret that he will never know of my gratitude for what was a crucial chapter in the book.
The stories from these men, boys really, straight from school, of the horrors they endured, and the courage that was called upon them to show, all recounted with cheery dismissiveness, were exceedingly humbling.
On the glamour front, as you might call it, fascinating stuff from Liz Smith, one of the great Fashion Editors of my own era, who had worked with some of the legendary photographers of an earlier age, as did my heroine; and from Felicity Green, OBE, Grande Dame of fashion and fashion journalism in newspapers from the fifties onwards, a true visionary and pioneer of some of the new trends in fashion photography and presentation.
Closer to home, and in the here and now, I have so much to be grateful for.
Especially at Headline, my publishers; I have a wise and wonderful editor, Imogen Taylor, patient and appreciative, who never seems to pressure or hurry me in any way, while somehow miraculously getting me to deliver copy when she wants it, and then to reassure me that it is not the load of rubbish I had convinced myself I’d produced. She is also given to sudden lightning flashes of inspiration herself which add to the story considerably. Truly an editorial magician.