Your Local Link’s very own Ben Robinson has now released his debut novel, Finding Charlotte, a deeply personal, one-of-a-kind fictionalised memoir based on real source documents and his own family history. We caught up with Ben to celebrate its release!
Caroline Street and York Minster feature prominently in Finding Charlotte. How important is York to the narrative, and are there any other local locations our readers may recognise?
It’s so crucial to the plot – it doesn’t just serve as the backdrop to the first part of the book, but in a strange way, it felt like a character itself. I think York is one of those cities that almost has a personality, and it acted as a plot driver. The unique lives in York’s slums made way for a lot of events, even down to the boom in the confectionery and railway industries, which shaped the lives we see in the book. Amongst many others, Blossom Street school was one of my favourite locations, as well as Aldwark – both these places had marred pasts, which made for some interesting research.
Seebohm Rowntree’s book ‘Poverty, A Study of Town Life’ played a key role in your research, and your own family were Rowntree workers. What would life have been like for Yorkies in the 1800s and early 1900s?
Like any city during that time, it varies, but what did strike me most about Rowntree’s poverty maps was the density of slums in York. When I first set out on my research, I imagined I’d find a lot of squalor, but that wasn’t really the case. The more I researched into social histories, the clearer it became that York felt like a real community, even in hardship.
A notable local event covered in the book is the zeppelin raid of 1916 – what can you tell our readers about what happened that night?
So many people I speak to have no idea about the zeppelin raid, but I think it’s so fascinating. It was one of the first major wartime events for York, and for many residents , probably the first time they felt the war arrive in the city. The raid lasted barely a couple of hours, and sixteen bombs were dropped on the city that night, one of which hit only a few houses down from Charlotte’s family. There were a couple of further raids later that same year, but the city had built defences by that time. I read one passage that explained that in the penultimate raid, the only death was from shock.
Our readers may know you from your monthly book review column, but did any specific books or genres influence you when writing Finding Charlotte?
I really wanted to walk the line between a couple of genres, which can be complex to do when they don’t traditionally fit together. At its core, this book is a biography of my great-grandmother’s life, but tying that to historical fiction was a challenge at times. When I first set out to write this, I wanted to keep it as close to reality as possible, but fictionalising elements of it gave me space to fill out the story without losing the original plot. I have always been an avid fan of history books, so doing the genre justice felt important…
Visit www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1036964701 to purchase your copy of the book. Find Ben’s Book Reviews in our magazine, and on this website!
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