Karen Wallace: A certain heartlessness

Karen Wallace's dark story for a 10/11-plus readership centres on Wendy, a young girl growing up in a well-heeled Edwardian family. Despite her privileged circumstances, Wendy is a lonely child, carrying the unwelcome secret of her father's infidelity with the glamorous Lady Cunningham and subject to the random cruelties of her tyrannical nanny. Echoes of J M Barrie's famous Peter Pan resonate within the story, but the link becomes clear only as the plot reaches its conclusion.

"It's really the story of an Edwardian childhood, with a twist. I wanted to imagine a situation in which a young girl would come to a point where she would either dream, fantasise or hallucinate a young boy coming through the window who will be forever young.

"Peter Pan was written as a play in the early 1900s and was hugely popular, and then J M Barrie was talked into writing a novel. Later there was the bowdlerised edition that we have at home, with fat little cherubs bouncing about--but the original novel is a really bizarre, black, heartless book about sexual frustration. Barrie was a strange man, he had a very unhappy emotional life and committed suicide.

"In one of the lines in Barrie's original version, Wendy says to Peter, 'My mother will be missing me, I must go home', and he--he is a heartless creature--says, 'You're wrong about mothers.' I wanted to explore that.

"I've always been interested in the Edwardian period. It was only 11 short years, but so extraordinary: not only was there the lavish lifestyle that some people had, there were also huge inventions--the cartridge fountain pen, the first flights across the Channel, it goes on and on.

"I read the memoirs of people like Sonia Keppel, who was the daughter of Edward VII's mistress Mrs Keppel, and Diana Cooper and Osbert Sitwell, and Vita Sackville-West's The Edwardians.

"You take just two or three little bits of detail from what you read. From Sonia Keppel's autobiography I took the fact that when Edward VII died, really fancy people sewed black lace through their knickers. I took Lady Cunningham's racy interest in motor cars from Osbert Sitwell, where there is an account of how his mother was fascinated by cars, although his father was very disapproving--for these ladies there was almost a sexual frisson being out in the open air with the speed and danger.

"That theme of heartlessness comes round again, because the children really were helpless if their nanny was abusive--in Edwardian times children were brought down to see their parents after tea, dressed in their fancy clothes, and then they were scooped off again. It's the heartlessness of the parents who don't bother to check what is going on behind the nursery door.

"The more historical detail you imbibe, the more you want to get into the head of the character you are writing about. Using absolute fact reinforces the fictional characters, but the emotional detail has to ring true as well."

Karen Wallace Wendy (Simon&Schuster, 6th October, £12.99, 068983747X)