I’m a traditionalist at heart and when my late husband and I moved into a run down fourteenth century hall house in Cheshire I felt as though I’d been given the keys to my own private form of heaven.

One of my happiest memories of that time is finding and falling in love with the silk fabrics of Watts Ecclesiastical Silks. There’s something about silk that sets it apart from all other fabrics; it possesses a strength and a fluidity that belongs to it alone, it carries the light in a very special way that is unique and incredibly alluring.

Silk is a grown up woman’s fabric, - Unlike my heroine Amber, I doubt that I would have appreciated it as a young girl. For me Silk whispers seductively of pleasures already known and ready to be reprised.

As you can tell, I was in love with the fabric long before I thought of writing the book.

I tend to believe that some things are just ‘meant’ to be. For me writing this book has been one of those things.

I already loved the fabric; my late husband and I lived on the outskirts of the Cheshire silk manufacturing town of Macclesfield for over twenty years; I’m fascinated by history, and I love the glamour and excitement of fashion and design. My own favourite reading is books that contain ongoing family histories, and as Annie Groves, I’m already writing books set in World War Two Liverpool.

The opportunity to write Silk filled me with the same kind of excitement and pleasure I’d felt the first time I looked at the silk I used to decorate my home. For me, Silk more than any other fabric signifies passion, desire and most of all sensuality, and it is these things that I wanted to reflect in the life of the book’s main character Amber. But silk also has strength and the power to withstand great pressure, and those characteristics too belong to Amber.

Amber’s own silk road, takes her from Macclesfield to London, from London to Paris, and from Paris to the South of France, and back again; it also takes her from peace to war, from fear, and loneliness to joy, from terrible loss to finding love, via the heights of intense passion and the depths of dreadful despair.

My own Silk Road, is outwardly perhaps less exciting, but it is a route that is taking me on a increasingly fascinating journey as I research the background facts I have needed and continue to need to write these fictional books.



For those who are interested in such things, here is a list of a small percentage of the books I have read so far during my research

Biographies

A wide range of books on the Mitford family.

Several of James Lees Milne’s Diaries.

Philip Sassoon Biography

The Duff Cooper Diaries

‘Chips’ The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon

Harry Selfridge biography Various books about Vita Sackville West and her set

Coco Chanel biography

1939 The Last Season by Anne de Courcy

100 Years of Vogue (not a biography)

A history of Hong Kong

I’ve researched web sites for details of cocktails, train routes, descriptions of artists/grand parties/jewels/yachts/the lives of the social elite of the 1930’s/the decline in both cotton and silk production in the U K/ the Olympic Games in Munich.

I’ve visited the Silk Museum in Macclesfield and watched silk being printed at Beckford Silk Mill, and tantalisingly I’ve found a thread that took a man from Macclesfield to what is now Iran in the early days of the war to source supplies of silk, that as yet remains hanging – as always the more I learn the more I realise how little I know.