Sometimes a story begins with one idea.

Sometimes two completely unrelated things collide and suddenly there is a novel.

The Dressmaker of Bloomsbury began with the second kind.

The first spark was political.

With so much discussion in recent years about governments, confidence, political instability and whether those in power still have the support needed to continue, someone mentioned to me that Britain had faced a very similar moment a century ago.

That sent me back to 1924.

Britain’s first Labour government, led by Ramsay MacDonald, was a minority government and had been in office for only a matter of months when controversy erupted around what became known as the Campbell Case.

The case concerned the decision to prosecute — and then withdraw the prosecution of — J. R. Campbell, connected with the communist newspaper Workers’ Weekly. The handling of the affair became politically explosive. On 8 October 1924, the House of Commons voted for a select committee to investigate the circumstances surrounding the withdrawal of the prosecution. MacDonald had treated the issue as one of confidence, and the following day he requested the dissolution of Parliament. A general election followed. (House of Commons Library)

Suddenly 1924 did not feel particularly distant.

The arguments were different. The parties were different. The circumstances were entirely their own.

But that atmosphere — politicians watching one another, a government that might fall, newspapers full of speculation, MPs wondering whether they would still have seats in a few weeks’ time — felt remarkably alive.

And somewhere in the middle of all that political noise, I remembered a completely different conversation.

A work colleague once told me about something she had overheard while attending her own wedding dress fitting.

It had nothing to do with Parliament.

Nothing to do with votes of confidence.

Nothing to do with Ramsay MacDonald.

But the idea of the dress fitting as a private little world, where people talk, secrets surface and lives are quietly being arranged while fabric is pinned and hems are measured, stayed with me.

And those two ideas began to meet.

Enter Grayson

Grayson Neal became my Member of Parliament.

He is a Conservative MP for South Kensington, comfortable in Westminster, accustomed to committee rooms, speeches, dinners and the constant flow of political paper that seems to breed on every available surface.

By the autumn of 1924, politics is becoming increasingly unstable around him.

In the manuscript, Westminster is quite literally described as “drowning in paper,” with Grayson surrounded by constituency correspondence, committee reports and an increasingly uncertain government.

But Grayson’s personal life appears, at first, considerably tidier.

He has a fiancée.

Helen is his closest friend — almost family to him — and the people around them see the marriage as obvious.

Appropriate.

Expected.

The trouble is that expectation and love are not always the same thing.

And then there is the woman making Helen’s wedding dress.

Enter Ethel

Ethel Simmons is a dressmaker.

She does not move through Grayson’s world of Westminster dinners and political connections. She comes from somewhere quite different.

But that does not mean she understands less.

Quite the opposite.

One of the things I have enjoyed most about writing Ethel is that people repeatedly underestimate her because of what she does for a living.

They see the dressmaker.

They do not necessarily see the mind behind her.

By the time Grayson takes Ethel to a political dinner, she is quite capable of holding her own in a room full of MPs. When one Labour politician assumes she cannot possibly understand parliamentary affairs, she calmly demonstrates otherwise — including discussing the Campbell Case and the consequences she believes may follow from it.

What matters to Grayson is not that he rescues her from that room.

He does not need to.

He watches.

He listens.

And he rather enjoys seeing everyone else discover what he already knows.

Later, while they are dancing, he tells her that what pleased him was watching people underestimate her — and then watching her prove them wrong.

That relationship became the heart of the book for me.

Two Very Different Worlds

That is where the original wedding-dress story became so useful.

A dressmaker’s fitting room and the Palace of Westminster appear to have almost nothing in common.

One is intimate.

The other is public.

One deals in silk, pins, measurements and whispered conversation.

The other deals in speeches, votes, alliances and political survival.

Yet both are places where people are being fitted into roles.

That became one of the themes running through The Dressmaker of Bloomsbury.

Grayson has a role prepared for him.

Ethel has one too.

So does Helen.

Society is very good at deciding what everyone ought to do next.

Who should marry whom.

Which woman belongs in which room.

Whose opinions carry weight.

Whose work deserves recognition.

And then people have the inconvenient habit of becoming themselves.

When the Story Changed

Originally, the wedding itself was the obvious centre of the story.

But as I wrote, something more interesting happened.

Grayson and Helen became people who genuinely loved one another — just not in quite the way everybody assumed.

They are best friends.

They have history.

They care deeply for one another.

That made the situation far more complicated than simply writing an unwanted engagement.

And then Helen’s past returned.

The man she had loved during the war came back into her life, and suddenly the future that had seemed settled began to shift.

Only after Helen leaves does Grayson and Ethel’s story properly begin.

By then, however, the groundwork has already been laid.

He has noticed her.

She has challenged him.

They have become friends before either of them quite understands what that friendship is turning into.

Which, given my fondness for slow-burn romance, was probably inevitable.

Why 1924 Worked So Well

The political setting gave the novel something I did not expect when I began.

It gave Grayson uncertainty.

An MP can appear powerful from the outside, but in October 1924 even his career is subject to forces far larger than himself.

The government falls.

Parliament dissolves.

Suddenly there is an election to fight.

In the manuscript, the change is almost immediate: after the confidence crisis, Westminster erupts into meetings, telegrams, campaigning and nervous predictions about what comes next.

And while Grayson is disappearing under election work, Ethel turns up with food and quietly inserts herself into the chaos.

That, perhaps, says more about their relationship than any grand declaration could.

History gives them the pressure.

The romance grows in the spaces between it.

From Conversation to Fiction

I love the strange route stories sometimes take.

A modern conversation about political confidence led me to the Campbell Case.

The Campbell Case led me to Westminster in 1924.

A colleague’s story about a wedding dress fitting gave me another world entirely.

And somewhere between Parliament and a dressmaker’s workroom, Grayson and Ethel appeared.

That is one of my favourite things about writing historical fiction.

History rarely hands you a complete story.

Instead, it gives you fragments.

A newspaper report.

A political crisis.

A dress.

A conversation.

A room.

A person who was not supposed to be noticed.

And then, occasionally, those fragments begin talking to one another.

That is how The Dressmaker of Bloomsbury came alive.

The Dressmaker of Bloomsbury is currently a work in progress. I’ll share more from Grayson and Ethel’s world as the story develops.