OH-3238_MaureenDuffy_e02.wav

Maureen Duffy: [00:00:00] I put it up as a novel to my publisher and got the backing to write it as a novel, and I had already done a lot of the research with the then equivalent of this machine. Yes, doing interviews and…

Interviewer: [00:00:22] How you found the women that you’d interviewed then? How did you go about that?

Maureen Duffy: [00:00:25] Well, they were all they were friends and acquaintances, a lot of them from The Gateways, because I was a regular visitor with my girlfriend at The Gateways every Saturday and we made lots of friends there. And it was a wonderful spectrum of interests and backgrounds and even some ethnicities. And so that was what I used, what I used for my interviews and. Also, some stories which I already knew about people, for instance, the people who’d been in the forces during the war were people that I knew and had heard their stories of what happened to them and so on. So and while I was sort of putting this all together in my head, a great friend, cycling along the beach with her girlfriend on one of those sort of beach tricycle kinda things was killed. That sort of also went into the book in a way. It’s a sort of memorial to her, which I’m just realising is not a story I’ve often told.

Interviewer: [00:02:07] Is she the character that is the friend? And I can’t remember the name of the character.

Maureen Duffy: [00:02:14] Yeah. ‘And I think by now you must be earth’….it starts. Yes. And that is that is her. So that’s how it sort of all began and. Sort of what was her life and what was the background against which she moved and, um, how do we go on and how should we go on?