A sense of place: Sue Purkiss

Like a scent, places can be extremely evocative. The right place brings a story alive for me as nothing else can - but it's not always that easy to find. For Warrior King, which was about Alfred the
Great, there was no problem at all. The west of England is littered with sites where you can stand and gaze at landscapes which can't have changed so very much in over a thousand years; as the wind whispers in the trees and a bird is startled up from a marsh with a cry which is the essence of loneliness, it seems that only a very thin veil of mist separates us from the 9th century. Try Athelney in the Somerset levels, or Wayland's Smithy on the ancient Ridgeway, only a stone's throw from the site of a significant battle.

Emily's Surprising Voyage would not have existed without its setting, which in this case was a ship - Brunel's SS Great Britain - which has been lovingly restored and which really begs you to consider and explore the stories of its passengers and crew.

But for the book I'm working on at the moment, it was not so easy to find and visit the place where it was set.

Some years ago, I decided I wanted to write something to do with my father's experiences as a prisoner of war. I didn't have much to go on: for years, he didn't talk about the war at all, and when he did eventually open up about it, what emerged were funny stories, sometimes told against the Germans, often told against himself. At every anniversary of Dunkirk, I would find myself getting indignant on his behalf - yes, it was marvellous that so many men were rescued, but what about the thousands who were't, and spent five years in prisoner of war camps? You never seemed to hear anything about them. But he didn't seem unduly bothered. He just wanted to forget it all, and thought on the whole that everyone else should too.

Then I read a remarkable book by John Nichol and Tony Rennell, called The Last Escape (Penguin). It was about the terrible march west in 1945: for reasons which have never become entirely clear, the Germans, as the Russians were advancing from the east, decided to evacuate the camps (mostly in Poland and eastern Germany), and force the prisoners to walk across northern Europe in the depths of a bitter and icy winter.

Dad had told me a story about something that happened on this march: as usual, a funny one, a story that made you smile at the strange vagaries of war. It was only from this book, though, that I began to understand what that journey must actually have been like. Sadly, by this stage, dad was no longer there to ask. I began to read other accounts, about Dunkirk, for instance. The more I read, the more I realised that dad's stories of hooch made from potatoes, football playing commandants, a guard who spent his time playing on an imaginary violin because he'd once been a member of the Berlin Philharmonic - all these, entertaining as they were, comprised only a tiny part of what life as a POW must really have been like. I wanted to find out more; I wanted to explore how it would be, to do a good deal of your growing up inside the confines of a prison camp. The outline of a story began to emerge.

I wanted to find out where dad had actually been: I wanted a physical reality to map onto the stories I had heard. From records at Kew, I found out the names of the prison camps where dad had been: Marienburg and Thorn. But I knew I would not find these names on a map of modern Poland; names were germanicised during the war. As ever, the internet came to the rescue. Thorn is once again Torun: Marienburg is Malbork.

I knew that dad had worked on farms and in forests, but beyond this, I had no picture in my mind of what he would have seen when he first emerged, blinking, from the cattle truck which brought him on the last part of his journey to Poland. I did not know what he would have seen if he was able to gaze through the barbed wire fence of the camp to the landscape beyond.

I need to know what places look like. I needed to go to Poland.

(This story is too long for one post, so I'm going to split it. Next instalment next month!)