Researching a new novel can be done anywhere in the world (or at least, it could, pre-covid). Armed with a suitcase, laptop and my writing head firmly switched on, I set forth on a magical adventure to research my new book, The Girl with the Scarlet Ribbon. But it was no luxury destination that I was heading to, it wasn’t even overseas. It was just two hours from home, to Scarborough, the British seaside town I used to holiday in as a child and a town that remains special in my heart.
Why Scarborough? Well, our family had many happy holidays there when I was a child and it’s where I returned to be married, too. Just thinking about the place now, writing this makes me smile. Scarborough is old fashioned, unpretentious, northern, cold and often rainy seaside town. But on the days when the sun shines, oh, the days when the sun shines and the cliff tops along the coast twinkle and shine… well, it’s the most magical place in the world.
And so I headed to Scarborough to carry out a week’s research for my novel The Girl with the Scarlet Ribbon which is out now in paperback from Headline. It’s my fourth novel from Headline and there are another two to come. All of my books are stand-alone and can be read in any order. They all feature a very strong heroine at their core and are set at the end of the first world war in northern England. They’re dramatic books, fast-paced, exciting and influenced by my love of TV Soaps and my experience writing TV tie-in books for ITV about the soap opera Coronation Street.
All of my books begin in Ryhope, a northeast coalmining village by the sea where I was born and bred. In The Girl with the Scarlet Ribbon, I wanted to include a family who were outsiders to the village, who didn’t fit in with the ways of life there. I began to think about where the family would have come from and there was only place I knew I could write about with confidence and joy. Scarborough. So off I went, by public transport – buses and trains – trying to make the journey as similar as it would have been to the journey my heroine would make in my story set over 100 years ago.
Once in Scarborough, I eschewed the usual tourist trips of walks on the beach, crazy golf games on the seafront and eating salty fish and chips. Instead, I visited places I’d never been to before. I spent time researching in the library and local studies centre; I interviewed a historian and took a private tour behind the scenes at The Grand Hotel, once Europe’s largest hotel. I soaked up the history of Scarborough as much as I could in the week I was there and it was a joy to see the place through different eyes.
However, I still needed something to tie Scarborough and Ryhope together in the book. I was fully prepared, as all novelists must be, to go ahead and make something up. And then it came to me, not once but twice, in the course of my research. Talk about a lightbulb moment! I discovered that in the 1800s the Earl of Scarborough used to holiday in Ryhope village in the very house in the village that I was fictionalising as my heroine’s home. Well, that just about knocked my socks off but there was more to come. In a maritime heritage centre in Scarborough, I found an advertisement from the early 1900s for a journey by steamship from London to Sunderland (where Ryhope is situated) and that ship, you’ve guessed it, stopped off in the summer months at Scarborough to pick up and let passengers disembark.
Armed with this exciting information that linked the two places I was writing about, I knew I had to include a steam ship journey in the book too. What happened next meant that I had to research steam ships, not something I ever thought I’d need to do but writing leads you along all kinds of weird and wonderful paths. The steam ship finds its way into The Girl with the Scarlet Ribbon to form one of the most dramatic sections of the novel where something happens which changes the fortunes of everyone involved. And that’s as much as I can say without giving away spoilers, I’m afraid!
If that’s whetted your appetite for more, and I do hope it has, you can find The Girl with the Scarlet Ribbon in all good bookshops, supermarkets, online and via my website at http://glendayoungbooks.com
You might also like to see: 5 Locations in The Girl with the Scarlet Ribbon
Glenda Young
Author of historical novels with Headline
Twitter: @Flaming_Nora
Facebook: GlendaYoungAuthor
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