Author Dinah Jefferies’ new novel, The Tea Planter’s Wife, has just been released. Dinah writes about choosing writing, choosing the East and what went into the making of The Tea Planter’s Wife. 

My fondest memory of growing up in Malaya is of the gardener shinning up the palm trees in our garden to cut down the coconuts. I loved Malaya and when we left to come and live in England I felt as if I’d left a piece of my heart in the tropics. When I was writing my first book The Separation set in Malaya and England in the 1950s, I was surprised by how many memories of Malaya came racing back: the bright yellow ice-cream, the Chinese circus, and our holidays on tiny semi-deserted islands. But most of all it was the colour, the exotic scents, and the feel of the heat on my skin.

[bctt tweet=”If you really want to write you just do it. No excuses. If you find yourself continually not writing, then forget it.”]

I had no plans to be a writer although I’ve always loved reading and throughout my life have scribbled little bits and pieces. An entire novel seemed too vast a thing to undertake. But when we were living in a tiny mountain village in Southern Spain, I had time on my hands and it was too hot to go out. It was the ideal time to think about writing a novel and so I worked out a plot and I began. It was as simple as that. I hadn’t expected to fall in love with writing, but I did, and the discipline you need to write is not a problem for me. If you really want to write you just do it. No excuses. If you find yourself continually not writing, then forget it.

As The Separation is dual narrative – one part is set in Malaya and the other part is set in England – I drew on my experiences of not only living in Malaya but also leaving it. The two narrators are Lydia, the mother, who is in Malaya searching for her missing daughters and Emma, her eldest daughter. The two girls have been taken by their father to England, and although the reader knows where they are, Lydia does not. Of course I also drew on the terrible experience of losing my teenage son to write this aspect of the story. You always draw on your own feelings and experiences when you write and in a way it was quite cathartic. And yet, although my own son died, I felt that even worse would be not knowing what has happened to your children, so that became the heart of my book.

Once I knew The Separation was to be published by Penguin, I decided to stay with South East Asia for my second novel. I already had the idea of a devastating secret at the heart of a marriage and it was simply a question of where and when. I chose Sri Lanka in the 1920s and 1930s when it was called Ceylon, and I decided on the title, The Tea Planter’s Wife. I read a lot of history and wrote the first draft and then travelled to Sri Lanka where I stayed at Ceylon Tea trails, on a tea plantation. It was so beautiful I didn’t want to leave, but the best thing of all was the extensive library where I spent my days fortified by endless cups of tea, and with my nose in a book. The reading I did there provided me with the kind of detail that makes a book feel authentic.

You have to remember that The Tea Planter’s Wife is a fictionalised story of what life ‘might’ have been back then. It’s not a travel book, or a history book, so while I hoped to make it as accurate as possible, the demands of the plot always come first. My apologies to those living in Sri Lanka for any errors in describing the place or its people.

Dinah with her just published novel, The Tea Planter's Wife, released in September 2015.
Dinah with her just published novel, The Tea Planter’s Wife, released in September 2015.

When I set a book in the past it’s important that I capture the flavour of the era and also the mindset too. I listened to recordings of tea planters talking about life on the plantations in the 1930s and their voice rang with the sense of their own superiority and entitlement. While I wanted to show the colonial racism that existed then, I had to make it palatable to a modern audience. So you’re always balancing different needs: the need to be true to the past and the needs of a modern reader. We also have to remember this story is set nearly one hundred years ago and that world of white colonials has vanished.

So what’s next? Well I’ve already been to Vietnam to research the third book, The Silk Shop in Hanoi. It will be published in the summer of 2016 and I’m currently working on my publisher’s edits. In the New Year I shall be going to India to research the one after that. My husband has Indian ancestry so it’s doubly exciting to be going there together.

Although I love inventing a story and then writing it, the research is also very special to me. I’ll never forget the moment I walked out of Colombo airport on to Sri Lankan soil to begin my research trip for The Tea Planter’s Wife. Brilliant life swirled around me: men jostled to carry my case, horns blared and people shouted, but little of that sank in. I stood there feeling terribly alone, stunned by the moist heat approaching like a solid wall. Palm trees waved in the wind, the scent of cinnamon drifted in the air and, feeling deeply assaulted by the past, I fought to stop my heart from pounding. Everything that had been taken from me came storming back, so much so that I couldn’t speak. It was my first visit to South East Asia since the sad day we left Malaya in 1957. Although I thought she’d gone forever, for just a moment I was child again. There she was; a little curly haired white kid, devastated at leaving the land of her birth behind.

Of course it was Sri Lanka not Malaysia, but the palm trees and the moist heat were much the same. It took me a very long time to get over leaving Malaya, and though I love England now, I certainly didn’t back then. Writing has helped me deal with the issues of loss in my life though that wasn’t what drove me. You have to dig deep when you write and that’s what I do, but the little piece of me that still belongs to the East will never fade. I can’t see myself ever setting my novels anywhere else.

The Tea Planter’s Wife was released in September 2015. Already a Richard and Judy Book Club selection, it’s available from WHSmith, all good bookshops, Amazon, and major UK supermarkets. The featured banner shows Dinah Jefferies, while in Sri Lanka at the Castlereagh bungalow by the lake.

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