Alex Hyde on her original début novel Violets

"There was the enamel pail of blood. She couldn’t think what she had done with it. She hated the thought of someone else emptying it.” This striking image begins Alex Hyde’s original début novel Violets, a story of motherhood and loss told in lean, spare prose, and set against the background of the Second World War.

It tells the story of two women, both named Violet. The first Violet wakes in Birmingham Women’s Hospital to the memory of the pail of blood, and the tired face of her serviceman husband Fred (who will soon be deployed to Burma). He tells her that their baby has “gone”. Later, a young doctor abruptly informs her that she has miscarried twins, and that her womb has been removed: “You’ll understand that you will not be able to bear children, Mrs Hall?”

I think those of us who grew up in normative, heterosexual families with a mum and a dad, with everything stable and certain, you can’t imagine what it feels like not to be sure of some foundational aspect of who you are

In the Welsh Valleys, another Violet lives with her widowed mother and works in a munitions factory as part of the war effort. She has realised she must be pregnant, and that the father is a Polish soldier, a former lodger in her mother’s house. He has since been billeted to Aberdeen and replies to her letter with sympathy—but enclosing a packet of pills to end the pregnancy. This Violet has another plan. She takes the train to Cardiff to join the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), passes the perfunctory medical exam by being economical with the truth, and becomes Private Davies. 

There is a troopship to Naples leaving almost immediately, and she seizes her chance to avoid the stigma of being pregnant and unmarried in Wales and give birth in Italy. The stories of the two Violets, told in alternate chapters, are joined by a third, poetic, all-knowing voice, who speaks directly to the unborn baby. 

Violets is loosely based on the real-life story of Hyde’s own father, who was adopted as a baby during the Second World War. It is definitely a fictional reimagining though, as she explains when we meet at her home in south London on a chilly November morning. 

Hyde tells me she grew up in Birmingham hearing stories about her father’s birth and adoption, “stories you are told that are mythologised and elaborated and Chinese-whispered all over the place”. She knew about the Welsh woman who fled to Italy to have him in secret, and that her own paternal grandmother had found this baby via a Catholic adoption agency. And that both these women had shared the same name.

Hyde, who is a lecturer in gender studies at UCL, says she always knew “if I was ever going to write something, I was going to start with this story”. But the “compulsion” to write didn’t come until after her nan (her father’s adoptive mother) died in 2015. Before her nan’s death, the pair had had conversations where Hyde learnt much more about her father’s origins. Hyde’s father knew he was adopted from an early age and had started searching for his birth parents as a teenager. Over the years he had amassed an archive of documents—official letters, dockets, ticket stubs—which his daughter was now able to use for her research.