What lengths will writers go to in order to research their books? For some, it’s quite far. Like drinking buffalo blood, or going to the Amazon jungle or the South Pole. For Louise Morrish, author of Operation Moonlight, it was grabbing her horror of heights in both hands and jumping out of a plane. She talks about her own experience of extreme research:
Picture the scene. A debut author is perched in the open doorway of a plane, the wind buffeting her face, her legs dangling over 15,000 feet of empty air. Strapped to her back is a parachute, which in turn is attached to a man she’s only just met, whose name she can’t now remember. This stranger holds her life in his hands. Quite literally. She’s doing her best not to think about this.
Instead, she tries to remind herself why she’s throwing herself out of a plane. She’s following in the footsteps of some truly heroic women, who suffered much worse than this. Those women jumped on their own, in the dead of night, over enemy-occupied territory, in the middle of a war.
It doesn’t help.
The author’s eyes are squeezed shut, and despite her best efforts she’s beginning to hyperventilate, her heart pounding so hard and fast she fears it will break free of her ribcage any second now.
I can’t do this! she’s screaming in her head. I’m too busy to die!
From behind her, the nameless instructor tells the author to “Get ready, we’re jumping in three…”
On hearing these fateful words, the author loses the ability to think…
“Two…”
The author loses the ability to breathe…
“One…”
The author drops into space…
Before I began writing my debut novel, I hadn’t given much thought to research. I knew of course that historical novelists read lots of books on their subject.
They also visit museums, galleries, libraries and archives when required, and sometimes even travel to locations to get a feel for a place. But I didn’t realise quite where my own research would end up taking me…
Operation Moonlight is inspired by real events in the Second World War. My main character, Elisabeth, is based on an amalgamation of 39 ordinary women who were recruited to work for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a clandestine government organisation.
These women were trained as secret agents, and then dropped behind enemy lines (in Elisabeth’s case Occupied France), alone and at night, tasked with helping the underground Resistance networks.
Naturally, I had to do a lot of research to make sure I got my facts right. This included reading over two hundred books related to all aspects of the war, poring over countless archive newspaper reports, and even interviewing the oldest man in Britain at the time of writing the book, who coincidentally lived in my own home town.
I travelled to places as far afield as Tangmere Air Museum in West Sussex, where many of the SOE agents were flown out from; Arisaig in north-west Scotland, where the agents were taught survival skills on the moors and how to detonate stuff on the remote beaches; and Beaulieu in Hampshire, where the agents were trained in Morse code and given advice on how to disguise themselves and survive interrogation.
I even hired an expert in close combat and self-defence, who taught me how to strangle someone without leaving a trace, just like my character Elisabeth is trained to do.
But when it came to researching the chapter where Elisabeth parachutes into enemy occupied France, in the dead of night, alone, with only moonlight to guide her, I was forced to confront my greatest fear: acrophobia.
I don’t mind the dark, I quite like time alone, and I feel drawn to the moon in ways I won’t go into here. But I’m terrified of heights. So much so that I can’t use ladders, or, it turns out, rescue my young son when he climbed on to a flat roof once and was left stranded there, sobbing (someone else had to get him down. He’s fine now.)
So, although I could imagine how terrified Elisabeth felt when faced with the prospect of parachuting into enemy occupied territory, and although I could describe all the sensations of fear she experiences when she’s put in a situation of extreme peril, I knew my words wouldn’t be totally authentic.
Because I couldn’t truly write the scene from my heart unless I went through the ordeal myself.
But how far was I really prepared to go in the name of research? Could I really risk life and limb and throw myself out of a plane? If I made sure my description of the Halifax bomber that flies Elisabeth to France was accurate, and if the process by which she is trained, equipped and sent out on her mission was factual, what did it matter if I wrote how she actually felt from the safety of my desk?
I thought long and hard, and in the end it boiled down to this: I owed it to those brave female agents of the SOE, who had risked their lives for us.
But what if my heart wasn’t up to the strain?
In an effort to convince myself I could overcome my fear of heights, I sought out other cases of writers who underwent extreme research; like the author who hunted deer with bow and arrows, and drank buffalo blood to get the taste right, and another who drove through a cyclone (albeit unintentionally), and so many others who ventured to remote and hostile environments, like the South Pole, and the Amazon jungle, and deep beneath the sea.
And what I discovered was that all these experiences provided the writers with something crucial: an insight they wouldn’t have got from reading books, or surfing the internet from the comfort of their armchair. Which is not to say extreme research is always necessary, of course. But sometimes, it might just be the key to unlocking the truth.
After my jump, when I’d regained my senses, I reflected on what the experience had taught me. I now knew exactly what Elisabeth felt when she was dropped from that plane, I could hear the throbbing of the engines, feel her heart pounding, taste her silent tears of lonely terror.
So although our most powerful tool as a writer is our imagination, sometimes it pays to stretch ourselves beyond the limits of our minds.
Sometimes we just have to do it.
Because only then will we know how truly brave we are.
Operation Moonlight by Louise Morrish is published in paperback on 30 March, 2023.
Louise Morrish is a librarian whose debut novel, Operation Moonlight, won the 2019 Penguin Random House First Novel Competition.
She finds inspiration for her stories in the real-life adventures of women in the past, whom history has forgotten. She lives in Hampshire with her family.
Historia features on related topics you may enjoy include:
The women agents behind the D-Day invasion by Mara Timon
Clare Mulley and Carolyn Kirby discuss the SOE agent Krystyna Skarbek (Christine Granville)
An interview with Clare Mulley, author of Krystyna Skarbek’s biography, by Elizabeth Buchan
The Remarkable Women of WW2 by Clare Harvey
Down the rabbit hole – to kill Hitler by Eric Lee reveals an SOE assassination plot
Imagining Olga Gray, a beautiful spy by Rachel Hore, about a somewhat different female wartime spy
The Remarkable Women of WW2 by Clare Harvey
And in My voyage discovering Charles Darwin, Diana Preston recalls following the scientist’s trail to the Galapagos islands, Tierra del Fuego, the Atacama desert and over the high Andes.
Images:
- Louise making her parachute jump: supplied by the author
- SOE agent Violette Szabo: Imperial War Museum record HU 16541 via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Arisaig: author’s own photo
- Louise further on in her parachute jump: supplied by the author
- Krystyna Skarbek (Christine Granville) in FANY uniform, the only time she ever wore it: Wikimedia (public domain)
