The authors of One Year One Night are getting questions about their writing ahead of publication. Sarah Onions and Laura Meloni Bywaters write under the pen name SL Roman.

The young adult fiction novel will be published in N. America in the early summer.

Reviewers wanted to know about the inspiration for their first work together. About 10 years ago the college where Sarah was teaching was involved in a ceremony to lay a stone on the resting place of a little evacuee boy that died in a bombing at the beginning of WW2. Sarah’s curiosity was tickled by the fact that he had laid there unacknowledged for so many years and that nobody had attended his funeral. She discussed the event with Laura and they set out to research the history of this boy and the circumstances of his death.

The reviewer asked if there’s anything from the pair’s own experiences in the lives of their characters. In a way War is a character in their writing. Both of them grew up hearing the stories of how it strongly affected the lives of their parents. 

Sarah parents were 11 and 10 in 1939 and they were Londoners. Sarah’s father Ron remembered delivering newspapers and looking up to see a dogfight between a German bomber and a British pilot. 

The issue of food was a very strong memory and Sarah grew up in a household where the idea of a sell-by date was a genuine puzzle.

Regarding going down to the Anderson shelter during bombings, like Annie and Remy do on their first romantic tryst, the most obvious memory was that Sarah’s parents were doing exams at school – to be interrupted by an air raid. 

 Ron’s mother worked in a military factory at night – he and his sister were sometimes left on their own. They would tune into the American Forces Radio for company. 

Families gathered round the radio can be seen in One Year One Night by SL Roman when the Corbett family listen to the news before their father goes off to war.

 Laura’s experience was very different as she grew up in Rome, in the Italian capital. That experience enables her to see the British from a removed viewpoint (she married a Londoner and settled in Britain). 

 Laura’s father was a key member of the Italian Resistance and he had been trained by the Scots Guards. His talents included skilful use of explosives to blow up Nazi railway lines. He had several different aliases and Laura remembers him having a bounty on his head by the German military. He was awarded a distinction for his contribution to the war by Field Marshall Alexander who was commander-in-chief of the allied army including the Americans.

 Both Sarah and Laura were brought up in families where money was treated carefully, influenced by a long period of austerity both in Britain and Italy. Laura said that a number of families were so poor in Italy that they went to live in caves when their homes were destroyed by the bombs.

And Sarah and Laura have revealed that they are writing a second novel with the same character of Annie now set in the London Blitz.