Blog Tour: Annie's Day By Apple Gidley

War took everything. Love never had a chance. Until now.

As an Australian Army nurse, Annie endures the brutalities of World War II in Singapore and New Guinea. Later, seeking a change, she accepts a job with a British diplomatic family in Berlin, only to find herself caught up in the upheaval of the Blockade. Through it all, and despite the support of friends, the death of a man she barely knew leaves a wound that refuses to heal, threatening her to a life without love.

Years later, Annie is still haunted by what she’d lost—and what might have been. Her days are quiet, but her memories are loud. When a dying man’s fear forces her to confront her own doubts, she forms an unexpected friendship that rekindles something she thought she’d lost: hope.

Annie’s Day is a powerful story of love, war, and the quiet courage to start again—even when it seems far too late.

Why there?

In the aftermath of a death, and in the busyness that surrounds the packing up of a loved one’s possessions, there is little time to do more than skim the official papers and photo albums of a life now over. I knew my mother had served with the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS). I knew she had been in Singapore when it fell to the Japanese in 1942, then had been posted to New Guinea. I knew she had been in Berlin after the war. But that was all. Not much. No detail.

In 2005, when Mum died, I had no inkling I would one day write fiction. Seventeen years later, there I was doing just that, and nibbling around at the back of my mind was her life in a box. It surely would be a good starting point for a novel. Not her story, but one using her army postings as a map.

Whatever the genre, a story needs a starting point, that wonderful moment as you’re washing the pots or weeding when an idea jumps in unbidden. So it was with Annie’s Day. Rather than take my character through her life chronologically, I would start the book at the end of her life. Her memories coming alive through one ordinary day at the Old Vicarage in Umbleford, a fabricated village in South Cambridgeshire. A time-slip story rather than pure historical fiction.

There are many wonderful books—non-fiction and fiction—about World War II, but relatively few about the grit and grime of war from an Australian army nurse’s perspective, and even fewer set in the Pacific theatre.

With the help Mum’s army records retrieved from the Australian War Memorial Archives, some of the writing barely legible, I put together a timeline and began researching Asia and the Pacific. I know both areas well, having lived as a child and adult in Singapore, and having worked in Papua New Guinea in the 1970’s. Education in Australia ensured I knew parts the Eastern Seaboard, but my knowledge of the war years in all three places was limited.

Maps, newspapers articles, pamphlets, interviews conducted by associations intent on getting people’s war stories down before they were lost forever, and of course books, are the life source of research for writers. The internet is a great starting point and sometimes tosses up an amusing gem. For instance, in early 1948, having just arrived in England, Annie is almost persuaded by an article written by Alison Settle, the fashion writer of The Lady, to buy a certain coat because it was both “fashionable and thrifty!”

Every writer draws on their own memories, sometimes subliminally, whether for a character or a place. It was only when I read the final proof of Annie’s Day that I realised I had loosely based Annie’s childhood home on an aunt’s homestead. In the novel, Auntie May’s house is unashamedly stolen, room for room, from another aunt. New England Girl’s School in Armidale is where I was educated for seven years—the chapel is as beautiful as described in the book.

The fall of Singapore on February 15th, 1942, is well documented, in no small part due to the monumental failure of the British government, who considered the island impregnable, and expected any assault to come from the sea. It didn’t. Instead Japanese troops bicycled down the Malay peninsula and attacked from Johor Bahru.

The Pacific war officially started with the destruction of Pearl Harbour in December 1941, about an hour after the Japanese landed on Malaya. It then moved to New Guinea where battles raged, first in Rabaul on the northern coast of New Britain, then onto the mainland over the Kokoda Trail, or Track, then at Milne Bay—where for the first time Japanese land forces were defeated, which helped lessen the Allied belief in the enemy’s invincibility. After his escape from Corregidor Island in the Philippines to Australia, US General Douglas MacArthur was appointed Supreme Commander of the Southwest Pacific, however the brutal battles for New Guinea and therefore a short step across to Australia, was fought predominantly by Australian forces, and the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles, and raged across the islands from January 1942.

After the losses of the war, Annie leaves the AANS, and craving a change and somewhere to heal a broken heart, she sails to England before getting a job with a British diplomatic family as their nanny, only find they are moving to Berlin. The blockade follows, and the subsequent airlift. A terrific book about that is Checkmate in Berlin by Giles Milton. If Annie thought food rationing in England was difficult, life in Berlin was infinitely harder despite having more access to goods than most people.

A year later, and now back in London, Annie’s story truly becomes her own, as the roadmap of drawn from Mum’s earlier life ends. Fiction built on historical facts. That’s why there!

Apple Gidley

Author Bio:

Anglo-Australian, Apple Gidley's nomadic life has helped imbue her writing with rich, diverse cultures and experiences. Annie’s Day is her seventh book.

Gidley currently lives in Cambridgeshire, England with her husband, and rescue cat, Bella, aka assistant editor.

Anne's Day is published by Vine Leaves Press.

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