I know exactly the moment I decided to write this book.
Inevitably, giving the setting, I was on holiday in Croatia, but I wasn’t
swanning around Korčula thinking how wonderful it was, I was sitting in the
small dining room of our cruise ship listening to our tour director, Darko
Barisic, talk about the Balkan war.
It wasn’t the history lesson that moved me so much – it was
his own story. At the time he was a child in Mostar, a brutal centre of
conflict, and his tales of living in bomb shelters, food parcels dropping from
UN planes, the lengths his family went to in order to spirit his older brother
out of the country before he was conscripted, were chilling enough. But when he told us his mother had disappeared
for a while (although thankfully she was returned to her family) I knew there
was a story to be told.
I knew, because the story was important, I needed a
publisher who would believe in it too. I pitched it to Charlotte Ledger at One
More Chapter as one of a number of ideas for a book to follow The Missing
Pieces of Us, and luckily it was the one she chose.
So in late summer last year I got back in touch with Darko,
who agreed to help me. He was going through another torrid time, with covid
having ripped away his livelihood, and he had had to join his brother in Norway
to find work. We used his quarantine period wisely, chatting on Zoom about not only
his wartime experiences, but also life in Croatia today as I wanted every
aspect of the book to be authentic. I could not have written it without him.
I would stress that my character Damir Maric’s story is not
Darko’s, and they have very different personalities. Research has shown that
remarkably, most children who grow up in war zones are not damaged by the
experience, particularly if they have strong family bonds and parents who are
able to cope with the situation. For a novel, Damir needed a very different
emotional journey.
I could have set The Olive Grove anywhere we visited on that
holiday, but I was drawn to
Korčula because of its sheer beauty, and also because
we had made two stops on the island, one in a small resort called Lumbarda to
swim. If only I had known at the time how often I would be going back there in
my head I would have paid more attention, taken more photographs. And of course
due to covid I could not return to research. All I can say is, when needs must
the internet is a wonderful resource.
