Sarah Cronin for interior design, and Will Steele for a gorgeous cover.
All the team at Usborne for all their work in turning ideas into actual books on shelves.
Gemma Varnom, whose messages and emotional support made all the difference when things got the better of me. Without her kindness and generosity of spirit, writing this book would have been a much colder and darker experience.
My family, who have lived inside this book almost as much as I have over the last few years – and now know more about both the First World War and its aftermath than I imagine they ever expected to.
Dale Dennehy, Garden & Park Manager of Dyrham Park National Trust property near Bath, who gave me a guided tour of the grounds as part of a research trip for a different book. That one never quite happened, but what I learned during that visit planted a seed that grew into a different story: this one.
I read a lot of books about the Somme and the life of a soldier in the First World War, but the one I found myself returning to was by John Lewis-Stempel, Where Poppies Blow: The British Soldier, Nature, The Great War, with its deeply moving, human perspective on life on the Western Front.
Although the Hopwood Home hotel and Hopwood-in-the-Hollows are fictional (as are Fallowmill and other houses mentioned in the book), the concept of the Thankful Village is real. The loss of life after the First World War was so extreme, so widespread, that towns and villages whose sons all returned from the war were the exception and not the rule.
A real-world version of the pillar in the glasshouse where the gardeners carved their initials can be found in the Thunderbox Room of the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall, where the garden staff signed their names on the wall before leaving to join the war. But wealth and privilege were no protection from grief either, and while the original owners of Hopwood Home are my own invention, their story was partly inspired by that of the Hoare family of Stourhead – now another National Trust property. Henry Hoare, their sole son and heir who died during the course of the Great War, lent his name to Hal – and it was only after I had written several drafts of the book that I realized one of the buildings in the Stourhead gardens is known as the Temple of Flora.