‘I decided about three or four years ago that having written 80 books I had definitely worked a lot more that most people,’ said Donna, who wrote the Burracombe novels under the pen name Lilian Harry, an amalgam of her parents’ names Lilian and Harry.
‘I am 82, I will be 83 in July and I worked until I was 78 so I thought it was long enough really.
‘People are surprised that you would stop writing, but it is hard work. I worked full time all day every day and one day I looked out at the sunshine and thought I’d quite like to be out there. There comes a time when you really feel you’ve done your bit.’
Donna lives at Whitchurch Down, above Tavistock, so ideal for walking on the moor. She loves the area, so much so that she’s lived here twice, going away to the Midlands and then returning much later. The first time was in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when she and her first husband, who was in the Royal Navy, settled at Whitchurch.
When she came back years later, as an established author of many novels, she saw the potential for using her first spell in the area as a setting for her nostalgic series of life in a Devon village. At the time, having cut her teeth with romantic and historical fiction under her own name, she was writing books set in the World War Two of her very early childhood. She had been born in Gosport, beside Portsmouth Harbour, one of four children, and spent nights in air raid shelters as a young child as the bombs rained down.
‘Somebody asked my agent for someone who could write a series of novels about World War Two set in London or Liverpool. I didn’t feel I could write about Liverpool, you need to know it very well to do that, but I did grow up during World War Two, nights spent in air raid shelters. I was young but I do remember it, being in the air raid shelter, night after night.
‘My publisher contracted me for six books and I did 18, a lot of them set in the Portsmouth area but not all of them. I did one about the evacuation of Dunkirk. Three Little Ships. It took a huge amount of research.’
The Burracombe books were her next venture, written once she moved back to the Whitchurch area in the 1990s looking back from the vantage point of having moved away from the area and come back again.
‘I used to live here in the 1960s,’ she said. ‘I came down here when I was about 23 and lived here throughout the 1960s, so I did know the area. I really felt I could capture the flavour of it.
‘Someone at my publisher suggested a series set in a Devon village in the 1950s and I thought “I could do that”. I was living back here by then — I’ve been here 25 years — so I thought yes, ok. Meavy is such a pretty village and I know Peter Tavy very well and some of the other villages and so I merged it together.’
She says she feels the area is recognisable, albeit conjuring up ‘a more gentle age’ of life in the Tavistock area during the 1960s.
‘It was helpful that I had been away and came back because I could remember that time like a photograph. There was no great change, but it was rather a gentler sort of time. I lived in Whitchurch as I do now. I remember I would catch the bus outside St Eustachius’ Church and when the bus arrived the men would all stand back and let the ladies get on first. You can’t imagine the ladies being too happy about that now, let alone the men.’
It is apt that she will be coming to Meavy Village Hall on Thursday evening next week to give a talk to the Dartmoor Society. ‘Really Burracombe is very like Meavy, because I put in the little bridge and the forge,’ she said. ‘There is a map at the front of the book and it is a lot like Meavy, with the old oak tree and the village green. The centre hasn’t changed. It can’t really, because the cottages are there just as they always have been.’
The appeal of her books, which remain much-borrowed in libraries and flying off both virtual and real shelves, is clear. ‘It is nostaglia, isn’t it?’ says Donna. ‘Nostalgia is about 50 years ago, whatever period you are in. It is your parents’ time or grandparents’ time. It is not too long ago that you can’t image what it would be like. People have cars, bikes, telephones and radios. It is like asking your grandparents for their memories or looking at old photographs.’
Donna, who has two grandchildren, returns to the wartime childhoods of two of Burracombe characters for her last novel — actually a prequel — A Child in Burracombe. ‘I think you get more attached to characters rather than books actually,’ she says, naming several, often the youngsters in the books.
It emerges during our chat that she has not entirely abandoned writing, having penned one pantomime for Buckland Monachorum Drama Group and being part way through another, set around Tom Pearce, the Tom of Uncle Tom Cobley in the folk ballad Widecombe Fair. She hasn’t yet set a date — ‘I haven’t finished yet!’ she says.
Donna will talk about ‘the creation of Burracombe’ at Meavy Village Hall on Thursday, March 24 at 7pm.
