Writing about World War 2 is not for the faint-hearted as most of the British have a fixed view and may have heard the stories handed down from their parents.

The battle with the Nazis appears to being rerun nightly in the form of military documentaries on TV.

The wartime leader Churchill’s home is still incredibly popular and Chartwell in Kent is visited by the public where they can see where he lived in wartime. Only recently a news story examined how people who had parents who were wartime kids were more healthy because their mothers and fathers had got used to cooking rationed food and in particular, with a lack of sugar.

The comic side of the conflict is also often shown on the screen in the form of the sitcom Dad’s Army.

Here members of the Home Guard struggle to defend this scepter’d isle to a funny effect.  Men over 41 and younger men who had a medical reason were part of the hapless regiment which went on to save countless lives.

Authors SL Roman had to steer their way round all of this received wisdom and cultural baggage. The authors are made up of Laura Meloni Bywaters and Sarah Onions, writing under a pen name. Laura argued for the setting of One Year One Night to be created in a fictional village which allowed the writers to describe their own backdrop – and characters- without worrying about what was already known about the Second World War.

What’s more – as 2025 approaches – there’s been a final burst of creativity knowing that the 80^th anniversary of the end of WW2 will be the last one for most of those who took part on the homefront or on the battlefield.

Journalists have been working on new accounts of this huge conflict including Professor Tim Crook who’s writing about the massive bomb weighing around 4,000 pounds which was dropped on Chelsea in London on the 1^st of November 1940 leading to what looked like a ‘November fog rising into the sky’.

The tale of the wartime editor of Vogue has been written about by Julie Summers. This story covers the incredible detail covered by the rationing of clothes which even extended to the measurement of knickers, so not too much cloth was used.

SL Roman are also working on a sequel to One Year One Night where they have been researching and writing about the Blitz for many months using some of the same characters they created starting in 2012.

Research by Laura Meloni Bywaters and Sarah Onions included reading the Dead End Kids by Bernard Ashley and The Secret History of the Blitz by Joshua Levine.

Films watched were Went the Day Well from 1942 by Alberto Cavalcanti which imagined a southern English village being overrun by German soldiers and – the recent release of Blitz by Steve McQueen, about an afro-caribbean child’s struggle to get back to his mother after evacuation.

There are military museums all over Britain including the Imperial War Museum and the Dads Army museum in Thetford, Norfolk. Old spitfire aircraft are brought out at air fairs for the public to admire, though they are becoming increasingly fragile.

So to sum up, One Year One Night by SL Roman is a young adult novel based on plenty of historical detail which sets the backdrop of a terrible conflict in a time of deprivation and destruction but also romance, resilience and humour.

Note to editor. SL Roman is the pen-name of Sarah Onions and Laura Meloni Bywaters who both live in the borough of Kingston in SW London. Sarah was born in Brighton in southern England and Laura was born in Rome. Permission for use of photos has been applied for from the BBC.

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