Once the writers of One Year One Night by SL Roman decided to turn the tale of the original unlucky boy into a novel, there were new decisions to make.

Sarah Onions and Laura Meloni Bywaters, writing under the pen name of SL Roman had to establish a village in their minds where the lively characters of their first young adult fiction novel would live.

Sarah wanted to set the story in Brighton. She was born there as was the original unlucky boy and she felt that readers from all over the world were more likely to have heard of Brighton. Also one of Sarah’s favourite children’s stories The Children who Stayed Behind by Bruce Carter was set in the bohemian town where two gangs of fictional kids roamed the evacuated streets in WW2.

However Laura was keen to make the original true story into fiction and she believed that it was better to create a new village so the writers weren’t held back by having to fit the story into London-by-the- sea, as Brighton is sometimes known. They agreed to differ and Millside was born.

Sarah remembered that the village of Kintbury where her cousin had lived had a canal and a mill. And if fictional Millside village was set there in West Berkshire – it was on the right side of London to have received a stray bomb on the night of November 14 1940 when hundreds of German bombers returned from Coventry in west England which was devastated.

From that dramatic start the authors dreamt up the people who lived in Millside and gave it a hardware store, where Annie and her Dad Steve worked, a church, pub, a school for younger children, village hall and on the outskirts – a manor house and a private school. And of course the home of kind Mrs Bassett, backing on to Annie’s home and store.

The hardware store doubles up as a home for the Corbett family and it’s there that 16 year old Annie has to take over running the shop when her Dad volunteers for war in that fateful year. The church was an important centre of the village in those days before mass media and social change in Britain.

Sarah remembered her aunt saying that the barons of wheat had made the real area of West Berkshire wealthy so it seemed fitting that the community hall was called the Farmer’s Village Hall.  

Farming is important for the story as many of Dad’s customers worked on the land and would come into his shop for supplies.

And it also meant that when food rationing began to bite, the villagers of Millside aren’t quite as desperate for food as they could get rabbits and game which had been shot by the farmers. Pork was available under the counter too.

The mill was key – as without giving anything away – it’s the scene of high drama in One Year One Night. And, Annie goes there on a romantic walk with her love Remy, wearing her mum’s high heels.

And as well as the physical features of the village, life there had stayed much the same as Victorian times. So change in the face of soldiers and evacuees put the community under pressure. The evacuees or ‘vaccies’ as they were nicknamed, introduced children from city areas with a broader perspective. The war brings disruption into Annie’s life and One Year One Night is the story of that change – told partly through her teenage diary.

Now on sale everywhere: at Barnes and Noble in North America and – in the UK, at Amazon.co.uk and in Surbiton, SW London at The Regency bookshop.