Angela Tomasky

Yes, so the infamous Gilbert, it refers to the five Gilbert siblings who grow up

in this crumbling Gothic mansion with their mother.

Thorn Walk is a big neo-Gothic mansion.

It was based on a beautiful real house, Tinsfield, which is near Bristol in Somerset.

Yes.

Well, I think that we do often come across stories that way.

As we're walking around our own environment, we see things, you know, tangible objects that spark stories.

memories.

So I'm looking at that, I'm thinking of Maximus as a real person in a real house, coming across these objects, and seemingly inconsequential little things

that carry meaning.

I think often it's these little things that are so important to us.

I remember as a child having a little box of a thread and a jelly bear, little tiny things that meant something to me, a blade of grass that I'd taken from the school playground and then couldn't put down again.

And these were more precious to me than many of the other things around me.

They really mattered to me.

In terms of the book,

I actually went on a tour of Tinsfield and saw the bed, the sort of deathbed of the last man that had lived there.

And of course, that was very quickly removed by the National Trust, who had just bought this house.

But I felt that so much...

atmosphere and so many ideas were conjured by this this this this simple very simple bed and it was such a shame that it was lost and it was sort of lost for good so that's where the idea came from so the combination of those two things my experiences as a child in this this view of this bed

They came to me as I was writing, I think.