Guest column by Victoria Purman
Victoria Purman is an Australian top ten and USA Today bestselling fiction author and sought-after MC and Chair for author events. Her latest book The Radio Hour was released in 2024 in Australia and NZ and will be published in the US and Canada in February 2025. Her historical fiction books A Woman’s Work, The Nurses’ War, The Women’s Pages, The Land Girls and The Last of the Bonegilla Girls have all been Australian bestsellers.
I call it the Saga of the Collapsible Umbrella.
Let me explain. I write mid-century historical fiction centered on the extraordinary stories of ordinary women and I pride myself on my detailed research. It’s actually what I love most about writing about an historical era: creating a world that some of my readers might barely remember but most weren’t even living back then. It’s the little things that can give a novel such wonderful texture and I love throwing them on the page.
Approaching Research in Historical Fiction
For instance, in one of my novels, a character is sleeping on a veranda in the middle of an Australian winter where the temperatures would hit zero. She could use a hot water bottle to keep her warm. Mmm. Were rubber hot water bottles even in use in 1943? Research to the rescue. Why, yes they were and they were commonly pink.
What did Australians eat for breakfast in the fifties? Toast with jam? Eggs on toast? What about Cornflakes? Research to the rescue. I searched for advertisements of the time in newspapers and magazines and voila – yes, the packaged cereal was on shelves in that era.
When my meticulous research came undone in my latest novel, The Radio Hour, well, let’s just say being brought undone by a humble umbrella wasn’t on my bingo card for 2024.
When the book was released in Australia, I toured extensively to support the promotion of the book. It’s something I love to do: getting away from the desk to meet readers, who are universally kind and say lovely things to me about my books which always makes me blush with happiness.
Except on this tour, I blushed with embarrassment.
The Umbrella
You see, I got the umbrella wrong.
The Radio Hour is set in the world of radio drama at a national broadcaster in Australia in 1956, the year television arrives in Australia. My main character is Martha Berry, fifty years old, a spinster, one of an army of polite and invisible women in 1956 Sydney who go to work each day and get things done without fuss, fanfare or reward.
When she is sent to work as a secretary on a brand-new radio serial, she finds herself at the mercy of an egotistical and erratic young producer without a clue, a conservative broadcaster frightened by the word ‘pregnant’ and a motley cast of actors with ideas of their own about their roles in the show. I loved writing Martha and I adored recreating the golden years of radio.
And yes, I did all kinds of research. How were radio serials recorded in the days before digital and before that, tape? They were recorded on wax discs and couldn’t be edited, so if an actor flubbed a line, the cast had to start again from the very first page. Talk about pressure!
I made sure I got all those technical details right so how could I have come unstuck with a humble umbrella!
The book is set in spring in Sydney, so I made sure Martha Berry carries an umbrella with her at all times because she’s that kind of woman: organised and prepared and efficient and smart. The line that appears in the book is this: “If the forecast had been for a wet evening she hadn’t seen it, but was relieved she made a habit of carrying her umbrella in her handbag every day, just in case.”
Hilariously, more than one reader alerted me to the fact that Martha couldn’t have carried her umbrella in her handbag in 1956 because they weren’t in use in Australia until the late 1960s. And I believed these readers because they were the right age to have been in the workforce back then and responsible for their own umbrellas!
Embracing the Mistake
Don’t get me wrong: my readers were good-natured about it and we all had a laugh together. I began using the story in subsequent events to show that authors are not infallible and sometimes despite our best efforts, we make mistakes. And I think readers appreciated it and we all had a giggle about the damned umbrella!
Sometimes we might fudge history just a little for the sake of the story and the Acknowledgements pages in the back of your book are your place to explain why you’ve perhaps shifted some events for the sake of the story or created composite characters based on real life people and their experiences.
When a Serious Error Occurs
If you make an error in your manuscript in which you get REALLY important dates wrong: the Moon landing, the beginning or the end of one of the world wars, the death of a famous figure for example, run screaming to your publisher and beg them to change it if it’s not too late. It is possible to have the change made in an e-book, too, much more quickly. Although, in a perfect world, things like that should be picked up in the editing stage. (Thank goodness for editors.)
If you do get something wrong, my best advice is to own up to it with a sense of humour. We are not perfect. We do our best and readers appreciate it when we admit that.
And you’ll always have a funny anecdote to talk about on the next book tour.
The Radio Hour by Victoria Purman
Approaching fifty and long overlooked, Martha Berry is the quiet force keeping the national broadcaster running—until she’s assigned to assist Quentin Quinn, an incompetent new producer. When Quentin proves useless, Martha secretly takes over, crafting a hit radio drama that captivates audiences while he basks in the credit. But as her success grows, so does the risk of exposure, forcing Martha to choose between staying in the shadows or finally claiming her place in the spotlight.
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