Luke Butler
In 2012 my wife Kat and I moved to Brentwood in Essex, where we lived in a converted chapel on the grounds of what was once Essex County Lunatic Asylum.
Outside our front door there were some graves belonging to the staff and patients who really did live between its walls, one of which was a soldier.
My wife worked in mental health at the time too so it became a natural affinity to want to tell a story about this place.
In terms of setting it during the First World War, that came from two things really. One was my romanticism of how I imagined it or at least the contrast serenity of Britain prior to the outbreak of the War. The second came from the fascination in where Mental Health was at that time. The reaction to the first shell shock cases coming back from battle, how processes to illnesses have changed and in many cases, not.
All the characters in Living Inside Raindrops are fictitious but many of the events themselves are real. As I started researching the local home front history of the war, particularly around Brentwood and Southend, that’s really when my inspiration ran wild.
Outside our front door there were some graves belonging to the staff and patients who really did live between its walls, one of which was a soldier.
My wife worked in mental health at the time too so it became a natural affinity to want to tell a story about this place.
In terms of setting it during the First World War, that came from two things really. One was my romanticism of how I imagined it or at least the contrast serenity of Britain prior to the outbreak of the War. The second came from the fascination in where Mental Health was at that time. The reaction to the first shell shock cases coming back from battle, how processes to illnesses have changed and in many cases, not.
All the characters in Living Inside Raindrops are fictitious but many of the events themselves are real. As I started researching the local home front history of the war, particularly around Brentwood and Southend, that’s really when my inspiration ran wild.
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