I love romance novels because I know they will end optimistically and with the characters in a relationship. That hope is so critical for me to free fall into the characters and plot.
So I don’t consider it a spoiler to say that Ned and Charlie get a very happy ending in These Old Lies.
To be clear, I put them through the wringer first, and there’s a lot of angst and reflection and maybe a bit of adventure, but at the end they get decades of happy. More then they could have dreamed of when we first meet them.
The reason I am writing a blog post about their happily ever after is that I think a few potential readers have a very reasonable fear that a love story between two men, set during a war, will Not End Well.
One of my goals in These Old Lies was to show the dichotomy that many queer people lived - moments of joy and community and acceptance alongside the very real fears of prosecution, especially for those that are marginalised or gender non-conforming.
Millions of men served in the British Expeditionary Force during the First World War. About 220 were charged for homosexuality. There’s two ways of looking at that statistic. On one hand it was minuscule when compared to the overall number of likely queer people that were serving. On the other hand, those 220 people suffered horrific indignities and punishment and that thousands in lived terror. So it’s both/and.
I wanted to give Charlie and Ned a full throttle HEA, but also one that felt credible to the reader and not dismissive of their earlier concerns about being in a relationship.
***Potential Spoiler alert, but really, only if you are very pedantic about it***
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The ending of These Old Lies was inspired by the life of Oliver Baldwin. He was
the eldest surviving son of British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, as well as a decorated war hero, a prominent a socialist, and, as it happens, gay. His long term partner, John Boyle, was accepted into the Baldwin’s aristocratic Conservative family, and invited to the Prime Minister’s official country residence. John joined Oliver at his posting to the Governorship of Leeward Islands. Yet this openness was not without cost, Oliver’s political career was stymied by his notoriety and he also was cut off by various family members.
(I’m still searching for a satisfactory biography of Oliver but this Wikipedia article isn’t bad)
To be clear, Ned isn’t Oliver (Oliver lived a much more dramatic life), but when I stumbled across John and Oliver in my research, I knew I had an example of a love story, with all its human compromises, that I could flourish and re-invent into Ned and Charlie’s.
To end where I began, I love romance novels because I know the ending - what keeps me hooked on a particular novel is the details of that ending. What does an optimistic ending mean for these specific characters? Does it honour the journey they have been on throughout the novel? This is what I aimed to achieve with These Old Lies - I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it.
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