A Rose for the Anzac Boys has made a big splash in the literary world, with a string of shining reviews across the country. It has already made it onto the New Zealand best sellers lists and is on its third consecutive print run to fill back orders in Australia. It would seem that French has touched on something truly sacred to the Australian and New Zealand psyche with this release.

She tells the story of Midge Macpherson, a New Zealand girl who is being schooled in England during the beginning of the First World War. To bring their lives a sense of purpose and to assist in the war effort, Midge and two of her friends open up a canteen in France to assist in feeding the endless stream of wounded soldiers returning from the front line. For the first time we see World War I through the eyes of women who volunteered their time, money and lives to the war effort.

I begun by asking Jackie why she thinks this novel has been received so well.

“I think what I have uncovered here is something different. We know the stories of the official women who were there [WWI], but there actually were a lot of unofficial women there. It’s only in the last ten years that the letters and diaries have been published of the people who were there that we are realising the extraordinary number of unofficial women (who were there). We assume these days that all the transportation and the feeding was done by the army, but back in World War I the army wasn’t equipped for that, that wasn’t happening. And overwhelmingly most of the feeding and the equipping and the transportation on land was done by women volunteers, but not just women volunteers like the VAD’s, these were unofficial women volunteers, women who just formed committees, women who just turned up there. All of the things in the book really did happen.”

A tremendous amount of research went into this novel, with most of the characters being based on real people and real events. As the WWI veterans are dying, their descendents are deciding to publish the diaries and letters of that period, giving us a more rounded understanding of what it was really like. Through the continuous reading of these true accounts French was understandably affected and came close to abandoning the project.

“There was a time as I wrote it when afternoon after afternoon my husband would find me crying over it, when I wondered, not just should I write it but why was I crying. And I realised that I wasn’t crying over the horror of it, I wasn’t crying at the statistics I knew the statistics. I was crying because they had transcended the horror of it. These were people who by doing their duty, doing their bit, ended up leading often incredibly happy and incredibly fulfilled lives afterwards. But amongst all of the horror there was love and there was friendship and there was courage. Often in times of adversity humans really show their best and we reach the greatest heights of what we can be. That was why I was crying, not from grimness, but in fact for pride of being human. Now WWI was in no way a noble cause, I mean war is one of human’s silliest inventions and WWI was possibly the silliest of all human wars both in the reasons that it was fought for and the way it was fought. But they gave it nobility and it was that nobility that was the reason that I was crying and that was the reason that kept me writing the book.”

This is actually quite a feminist novel as well; it talks a lot about the opportunities and roles of women traditional to that era. It is quite surprising to be reminded that the most basic rights of voting and higher education weren’t available to women less than one hundred years ago.

“That’s why it is such a fascinating time, these were women who basically started off at the beginning of the war preparing afternoon tea for tennis parties. They ended the war this stroppy, unstoppable army. The war really was their university and their training ground. And when you look at the names of the women volunteers over there and you look at the names of the women who were forming committees in Australia and New Zealand for sending everything from clothes to food to tommy cookers etcetera, you see the same names appearing over and over and over in the 1920’s and the 1930’s. These were the women who fought for the right to vote in England, who voted for free education and equal opportunities for girls, who fought for the rights for women to actually obtain degrees, for women to become doctors, who fought for free libraries, for maternity hospitals for children. The same names over and over.”

This is a very inspirational book for young people, especially for young women. I asked Jackie if this was part of her motivation for writing the novel.

“No. Look, I would love to say that I was, I think books, especially historical books do give kids a sense of power, a sense that the world of the past was different and that people changed it and that so they too have the power to change society and they are able to envisage the sort of future that they want. I think that historical fiction is an extraordinarily powerful tool when given to kids. But to be absolutely honest, no that was not why I wrote that book or any other book. I write because I am obsessed with a topic, I write for the sheer exhilaration of doing the research and putting it together and creating the world and making a book that works. I write often because of those whispers from the past that say remember me, remember me”.

There is general agreement in the writing community that writing for children and young people is very different from writing for adults. In our conversation Jackie fervently explained her own philosophy on writing for children.

“Kids understand a lot more than we give them credit for. I think one of the worst things that you can do is to write down to kids and assume that they do not understand much about the world. They may not have much knowledge about the world, but that’s very different from not understanding what’s going on and what they see. And in fact on the contrary I think that kids have got greater perception than adults. It’s the evolutionary job of a kid to understand the world and to work out how it works. Kids are often far more fascinated by concepts of good and evil and about how the world works politically and socially than adults are. Adults have learnt it all and most of us go from just paying the mortgage to what’s going on next weekend. Kids on the contrary are constantly looking at, learning at and evaluating the world. We often do underestimate what they are capable of understanding and what they are hungry for. And often kids are extraordinarily hungry for books that tell them how the world works.”

Winning a swagger of awards over the years including a number of Children’s Choice Awards, I ask French if she feels that this confirms to her that she is on the right track.

“Yes it does, awards do help. Writing is very solitary, often it is hard…you don’t see people reading your work, you don’t see the reaction to it. The only other things you can go by are sales and awards, so yes awards do mean a lot. It is one of the few recognitions that you do get about how people feel about your books. Kids will never say that they enjoyed a book if they didn’t they are absolutely honest, of all of the awards I have gotten I think the children’s choice awards mean the most.”

Image courtesy of Harper Collins.