Guest Post: Writing Fifty-One by Chris Barnham

My time travel romance novel, Fifty-One, is published by Filles Vertes Publishing on 12th February. It’s a twisty tale, as time travel stories should be, with romance, excitement and tragedy. And a surprise ending you won’t see coming.

It’s also a story with strong roots in the part of London where I live. It was a terrible event in our local history that planted the seed of the story in my mind.

Half a mile from my home is Lewisham High Street. There’s nothing special about it – shabby, even by London standards: a street market, cheap restaurants, phone shops and chain stores. It’s seen better days.

One day that definitely was not better – indeed, it was probably the worst – was Friday July 28th, 1944.

On the wall outside Marks and Spencer, is a plaque. I stopped one day and read it. July 1944 was already five years into a ruinous war. London had suffered terribly in 1940-41, when the German air force bombed the city nearly every night for months. But, late in the war, when the Germans were clearly losing, London suffered a short but frightening reprise of the aerial bombardment, when Hitler unleashed his long-rumored new weapons, starting with the V1 – a jet-propelled, pilotless plane.

These flying bombs terrified Londoners. They came at any time, droning across the city’s sky until their engines cut out, and the V1 spiraled blindly down, to explode wherever it landed. There was no protection – they contained more high-explosive than any previous individual bomb, and they fell indiscriminately, meaning blackout precautions were no protection.
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After I read the inscription on that plaque, I looked around, seeing the street with new eyes. I counted the people I could see around me, losing count in the forties. I tried to imagine what it must have been like – 9:41 on a Friday morning, a busy shopping street, explosive death falling from a clear sky, killing in an instant everyone I could see, and wounding hundreds more. Lewisham High Street, after the July 1944 V1 It stuck in my mind, the horror of those seconds as the bomb came down. I knew I had to write a story about it, which I duly did.

It was a ghost story – a short piece called ‘Fifty One’ – in which a boy accidentally causes his girlfriend to run to the precise place the bomb fell, bringing about her death. He’s haunted by the thought of what was in her mind as she died – the belief that he had betrayed her, and she died before he could explain. The twist in the story is that the narrator was also killed by the bomb, and forever frozen in place, able to see his similarly ghostly lover, but unable to reach her. The story won a Dark Tales contest, and appeared in Dark Tales 16 a few years ago. You can find it here.
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But the V1 stuck with me, nagging away at the back of my mind. I knew there was more to write about that incident. I started writing the novel that would eventually also be called Fifty-One.

It often happens that a short story provides the seed for a longer work. Fifty-One was a little unusual in growing out of two short stories. The Dark Tales piece (Fifty One) provided the V1 disaster. But I took other important elements from another, very different short story, which appeared in the November 2016 inaugural issue of Phantaxis, a science fiction and fantasy magazine.

This story was called‘How Stanley Spencer Painted the Cookham Resurrection’, it was a light-hearted time travel romp, in which a team of timecops go back to the 1920s to prevent religious fanatics stopping England’s top 20th Century painter completing his masterpiece. Instead (spoiler alert!), they inadvertently provide the inspiration!

Mixing time travel with the stark power of that bomb falling on a London market street, gave me the germ of the novel that became ‘Fifty One’. In this story, the main character is Jacob Wesson, a timecop sent back 100 years from 2040 to wartime London to foil a plot to assassinate Winston Churchill.  The assignment plays out with apparent ease, but the jump home goes wrong, leaving Jake stranded in the war-ravaged city.
 
Stuck in the past, Jake must pull from his training and blend in. He clings to the one familiar face he can find, Amy Jenkins, a war widow whose life he saved during the assignment. Drawn to each other by their loneliness and thrown together amid the terror of war, Jake and Amy look to a future together.

But Jake’s future cannot let him go. And when his bosses finally find him in 1944, Jake faces a terrible choice: risk unraveling the modern world, or let Amy die…​About the BookTitle: Fifty-One
Author: Chris Barnham
Genre: Historical SciFi / Time Travel
Publisher: Filles Vertes Publishing, LLC
Publication Date: February 12, 2018

PreorderJacob Wesson is a timecop from 2040, sent back to WWII London to stop the assassination of Britain’s war leader. The assignment plays out with apparent ease, but the jump home goes wrong, stranding Jake in war-ravaged 1944. Jake’s team, including his long-time girlfriend, is desperate to trace him before something else goes wrong.

Stuck in the past, Jake must pull from his training and blend in. He clings to the one familiar face he can find, Amy Jenkins, a war widow whose life he saved during the assignment. Drawn to each other by their loneliness and thrown together amid the terror of war, Jake and Amy look to a future together.

But Jake’s future cannot let him go. And when his bosses finally find him in 1944, Jake faces a terrible choice: risk unraveling the modern world, or let Amy die.
About the AuthorChris Barnham used to work for the British government, advising Ministers on education and employment policies. Now he makes stuff up for himself. His short fiction has appeared in a range of magazines, including Compelling Science Fiction, Interzone, the UK’s premier science fiction magazine, Black Static, and the late-lamented Pan Books of Horror.

Chris lives in London, England, with three tall children and a scary wife. Whenever work allows, he spends as much time as possible out of town with mud on his boots. His latest walking challenge is the 630-mile South West Coast Path, around the Devon and Cornwall coasts. You can follow his (slow) progress on his blog.
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