Jon's Grandfather
A few of the artefacts featured in the book are drawn from artefacts Jon came across in real life. For example, the damaged photograph of the airman was a picture of his grandfather. If you look very closely you can see the scratches which were made by his mother when she was a young child.
The WW1 tobacco tin, complete with unsmoked cigarettes, was shown to him by his mother-in-law. It belonged to her father, who was given it while fighting in the trenches.
The Coventry museum in the book is based, as will be clear to anyone who knows Coventry, on the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, which was recently refurbished and now has an excellent cafe as well as great collection which is well worth exploring. Jon chose not to name it as “The Herbert” in the book to avoid any individuals who worked there or had worked there in the past thinking he might be writing about them. He certainly wasn’t.
For more information on the museum, go here.
The tea-room in the Aberdeen museum where Eleanor is working when David first meets her is purely imaginary. There is no such tea-room in the granite city. But there are some very fine museums and art galleries.
It was while visiting Aberdeen to research the novel that Jon happened to watch the marvellous documentary film Spellbound,which he says helped him to realise that he was actually writing a novel about exile.
Neither the priest nor the church in Donegal had any basis in fact. But Donegal is a wonderful place to visit if you like vast, empty beaches, rugged hills, tiny pubs, and good music; and you don’t mind a spot of rain.
One of the sources of this novel was a story Jon wrote in 2003 called The First Thing That Happened, about a man visiting a mediterranean island to find someone who knew his father. It was first published, in Dutch, in a Dutch magazine, and later in the US magazine Conjunctions. It will probably not be republished now that it’s been subsumed into the novel, but you can read it here.
