The first glimmer of an idea for The Secret Horses of Briar Hill came to me during a long drive to a librarian’s conference across my home state of North Carolina. My car radio was broken, and I found myself alone with a rare few hours of silence. As I drove past farms and horses, my mind wandered, and I thought about all the books that had deeply affected me as a child. I devoured books like The Secret Garden and the Chronicles of Narnia, which combined reality with dreams, history with fantasy, darkness with heart, and, most of all, contained true magic. I started to daydream about a magical place, and by the time I arrived at my destination, Emmaline felt as real to me as a sister.
I began to work on this book by looking into childhood illnesses and World War II, and my research took a sudden personal turn. My grandfather passed away a few years ago, and while working on The Secret Horses of Briar Hill, I happened to find a collection of paperwork and memorabilia from his time serving in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II. When he was only eighteen, his plane was shot down over Italy, and he was put into a German prisoner-of-war camp, from which he was fortunately freed a year later. The grim man in the black-and-white prisoner-of-war photo I discovered contrasted greatly with the warm, loving man I had known. My grandfather had run a farm and raised a family. He loved fishing, and regularly indulged in homemade apple pie. Among his things was a letter he’d written about the importance of finding beauty in the darkness of war, and this left a deep impact on me. I decided to convey this sense in my story through the eyes of someone small and alone, who had that rare ability to find such beauty.
In order to capture the atmosphere of wartime Britain, where Emmaline lived, I turned to the BBC’s WWII People’s War project, a wealth of firsthand accounts from soldiers, nurses, civilians, and children who lived through this period. I read about a doctor who created a color-coded diagnosis system for children with tuberculosis, much like Dr. Turner does. I read about a nurse who fell in love with a soldier so ill that he could never be kissed—just like Anna. And as I researched tuberculosis, I thought about how for children, illness could be parallel to the battles adult soldiers were fighting.
You might be curious to know what other parts of this book are based on historical fact. Though Briar Hill hospital is fictional, there were several children’s hospitals and tuberculosis wards operating during the war. Occasionally parents were allowed to visit their children, though they were often separated by glass partitions to prevent the spread of disease. Because of the crowded conditions and limited resources, tuberculosis was more prevalent during the war years, but due to medical advancements, by 1945 cases of tuberculosis were in decline (with a sharp drop in the 1950s after vaccines were developed). Today, though tuberculosis has been nearly eradicated in the United States and Great Britain, one-third of the world’s population is infected with this disease.
Emmaline called tuberculosis the stillwaters after the Latin proverb “still waters run deep,” which means that quiet people are often hiding a deeper nature. To Emmaline, this saying meant that children may be overlooked as being simple, but they are often struggling with deeper battles, such as illnesses, that aren’t always visible on the surface.
When Emmaline describes her neighbors leaving the major cities for the safety of the country, she is talking about Operation Pied Piper, part of a greater evacuation in Great Britain during which over 3.5 million people were relocated. Shropshire, the region where Briar Hill hospital is located, was a prime destination for children, as it was far from major cities or factories that might have been a target for bombings. Emmaline’s family’s bakery was inspired by a real building, the Co-op Bakery, located on Meadow Lane in Nottingham, which was badly bombed during the Nottingham Blitz in May of 1941.
Thomas’s father, Sergeant Whatley, is fictitious, though inspired by true commanders such as Lieutenant General Frederick Browning, Major-General John Campbell, and Lieutenant General William Gott. The emblems on Thomas’s father’s war medal, along with the sayings Utrinque Paratus and Bellerophon et Pegasus, are real. The medal comes from the British First Airborne division and was also used by soldiers trained in the Special Air Services; its insignia of a winged horse and rider was rumored to have been designed by Browning’s wife, the celebrated author Daphne du Maurier (whose books happen to be among my favorites).
Many readers ask me what exactly happened to Emmaline in this story. Some think she didn’t survive her illness, and the final chapters represent her dream of being at peace. Some believe she did survive and stayed at Briar Hill to help the other children. I do not think there is an answer, just as I cannot tell you if Thomas really is the Horse Lord, or if the winged horses were real or existed only in Emmaline’s imagination. I think each reader is entitled to believe what she or he wants to believe. Whatever Emmaline’s truth, I know for certain that darkness can be defeated by hope, and I know that one girl, no matter how small, can make her dreams come alive.
Ride true,
Megan Shepherd