Today, I’m visiting Allison Tait’s Writing for Kids blog, talking about time travelling to the past.

I talk about what it was like to research Haywire, a novel set in 1939 and 1940, and the things that helped me ‘inhabit’ another world.

I don’t mention some of the things I got wrong and had to fix after a visit to Hay. For example, my character hides in a big roadside drain … except there are no drains like that in Hay. Not one!

And then there was the river, which I imagined as having boulders at the water’s edge. Oh, no, no, no. The banks were sandy – not a boulder in sight!

And we won’t even mention the internment camp fence – ah – fences.