A surprise revelation by her mum led to a work mingling fact with fiction for first time novelist Amanda Roberts. Jaine Blackman reports

They say that truth is stranger than fiction – and it’s certainly proved to be an inspiration for Amanda Roberts, who has taken a family secret and crafted it in to a novel.

“ About 13 years ago, I was pregnant with my youngest son and my parents were staying with us in Forest Hill [near Wheatley].

“My mum and I were sitting on my bed, I can’t remember what we were doing, probably going through baby clothes when she suddenly asked me how I would feel if my granddad wasn’t my granddad,” says Amanda.

“Obviously, I was taken by surprise – not the sort of question you expect to come at you out of the blue.”

What her mother went on to tell her eventually formed the basis for Amanda’s first novel The Roots Of The Tree, about a woman who discovers the man she thought was her father, wasn’t.

Amanda, always an avid reader, who did a degree in English Literature, ran her own publishing company until last year when she began working as a freelance writer and and concentrating on her novel.

“Like many a journalist/editor, writing a novel was something I’d wanted to do for some time and I had already started on what would become The Roots of the Tree, but it wasn’t until I scaled down my business that I had the time necessary to finish the story I had started – even so it still took me about three years to write it and another two to get it published,” she says.

Amanda, who now lives in Islip with her partner Mike and their sons Sam, 15, and Luke, 12, used what her mother had told her years earlier in her fiction.

She recalls: “My granddad had been dead for about three years by this time and my grandma had also just died.

“In the process of sorting out my grandma’s possessions my mum had found their marriage certificate in an old handbag in my grandma’s wardrobe.

“It was the only item in the handbag. Just like Annie in The Roots of the Tree my mum looked at the certificate and immediately noticed the date was a couple of years after her own birth date.

“This part of my mum’s story is fairly accurately retold in The Roots of the Tree.

“She started to ask questions in the family, certain that my granddad, who was a very honourable man, would have married my grandma when he knew she was pregnant if he had been around at the time.

“He was a steel worker so he was in a protected profession and hadn’t been sent to fight. “ There was only one person still alive who could remember what had happened, an aunt who lived in Canada.

“She gave us a name and she led us to believe that my mum’s real father had wanted to play a part in her life, but by then my granddad was on the scene and he insisted that my mum should never be told the truth, that he was going to bring my mum up as his own daughter and her real father could have nothing to do with her,” says Amanda.

“The family appear to have gone along with it – certainly nobody breathed a word of it to my mum and if she hadn’t found the marriage certificate she would have been none the wiser.”

The family decided not to dig any deeper.

“We did not try to find out the full truth, for several reasons, but mainly because I don’t think my mum would have been able to cope with whatever we might have found,” says Amanda.

“She was in a bad place mentally and emotionally anyway – at the same time as making this discovery my younger sister was seriously ill.

“It was all too much for my mum and she really cracked up. She was seeing the ghost of my granddad in her house at night – she thought he resented her and that she was somehow responsible for him making decisions that may have changed the course of his life, particularly that my grandparents didn’t have another child – but of course, we don’t know whether that was a deliberate decision or not.

“It took my mum years to recover.”

When the dust had settled and her mother had “sort of come to terms with what had happened – as far as anyone ever could come to terms with something like this and the knowledge that she would never know her real father”, Amanda knew this was the story she wanted write.

“I’ve woven fact and fiction together in The Roots of the Tree,” she says.

“There are a lot of true details, but there’s also a lot of fiction. For instance, Lily did not exist, there wasn’t a family feud that I know of, there were no love letters and I have no idea what did happen to my real granddad.

The Roots Of The Tree by Amanda Roberts, Book Guild Publishing, £9.99

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