Lines and Shadows
Lines and Shadows is set at a secret RAF base in Suffolk in the early 1960s. The fictional base is sited on Orford Ness, named Aldeford in the book, although in ‘real life’ the Ness was a bombing range, and the air base was on the other side of the river Deben. The Ness, now a National Trust nature reserve, was used for ballistics tests in preparation for the British H-bomb tests in the Pacific.
I worked at the base, but I feel that it is legitimate literary licence for the author to re-site it, allowing her to capture the eeriness of the Ness and the great abandoned keep of Orford castle (now refurbished as a tourist attraction). I am less comfortable about the research being portrayed as an Anglo-American project. The Americans were distinctly unenthusiastic about Britain developing its own H-bomb. Nonetheless, the plot centres on the CIA tracking down a covert anti-nuclear activist at the base.
Not that the book is really about the Cold War. It is principally concerned with the relationships between three young female civilian employees billeted in a cottage in the village, with a romance, a marriage and a mental breakdown, all with an element of the supernatural based on a local folk legend. This beautifully crafted little novella so captures the otherness of the Suffolk marshes and the claustrophobia of life in a secret, isolated research unit that I only wish it had been longer.
