Three Things That Inspired Two Metres From You

There were so many things that gave me the motivation to write Two Metres From You – my military childhood was part of the foundations for Gemma’s character, my dog Mabel was vital to the plot (and my sanity during writing), and music played a big part in framing Gemma’s memories and getting me through long lockdown days. But those aside, here are the three biggest things that inspired the story:

1.      Village life in lockdown

One of the things I really wanted to capture in Two Metres From You was how disconnected rural communities like Wiltshire felt during the first lockdown – in the early months Coronavirus felt like it was happening somewhere else, and the day-to-day impact played out in households rather than in hospitals. The pandemic is the backdrop to the story, but it’s not what the story is about – nobody gets sick, none of the characters ever mention knowing somebody who has the virus, because that’s kind of how it was for most of us living in the countryside at the time.

For a number of years my partner and I lived in the small Wiltshire village that inspired the fictional Crowthorpe. We rented a cottage there and I regularly volunteered at the local community shop. Even though we didn’t live there when Covid-19 struck, I know the shop became a vital community hub, and I really wanted to celebrate the way small villages came together when normal support networks weren’t available.

Incidentally, the day that I started querying literary agents with the finished manuscript, the roof of the house that was the inspiration for West Cottage caught fire, gutting the whole space that served as Gemma’s bedroom/bathroom in the book. I drive past it sometimes and always feel irrationally terrible, like somehow it was my fault.

2. The Old Wymondham Library

In Two Metres From You Gemma shares how her love of books was forged in a library housed in an old mediaeval chapel in the town of Wymondham in Norfolk. This is very much a real place – my grandparents lived in and around Wymondham all their lives, and the town library was housed in Beckett’s Chapel until it moved to a purpose-built building in 2008.

During the 1980s my parents would send me up to see my nanna and grandad for a couple of weeks during the school holidays, putting me on a coach in Swindon that arrived in Wymondham seven hours later. I know it seems ENTIRELY INSANE to put an eight-year-old child on a bus alone by today’s standards, but in 1982 you just gave the driver £5 to keep an eye on your child and hoped for the best. I did that coach trip a couple of times a year for the best part of a decade, and somehow managed never to get abducted or murdered or lost in Northampton.

ANYWAY, my grandparents were a million years old and didn’t own a car, so holidays with them involved playing cards, watching snooker on a black and white TV and reading books. Wymondham library was a place of wonder and distraction, where I quickly exhausted the kids’ books and moved on to thrillers and romances. I distinctly remember reading Flowers In The Attic aged twelve or so and deciding that adult books were the way forward. If I close my eyes I can still smell that place – furniture polish, paper and eight hundred years of dust.

3. Dreams of Leaving by Rupert Thomson

This is one of my all-time favourite books, all the more brilliant for being Thomson’s 1987 debut. It’s partly set in a village in Sussex where nobody is allowed to leave, to the point where the village has its own police force to stop the locals escaping. Thomson’s village is a dark, unsettling place where the residents all experience varying degrees of insanity, but I’ve always rather loved the idea of a story about someone who is forced to integrate into a small community in a way that changes their life for the better.

The idea rattled around in my head for years, but I didn’t have a convincing reason why somebody would be compelled to stay – in a non-dystopian world with democratic freedoms, rarely does anyone HAVE to stay anywhere. Then lockdown happened and the missing piece of the story fell into place.