I’m thrilled to welcome Helen Peters to my blog today to talk about her latest book Friends and Traitors, which is featured in The Guardian’s Summer Books Roundup.

Helen Peters is an award-winning author whose books have been nominated for the Carnegie Medal, shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and named as the Independent Bookshops Children’s Book of the Month and The Times Children’s Book of the Week.

Other books she has written include: Anna at War, Evie’s Ghost, The Secret Hen House Theatre, its sequel The Farm Beneath the Water, and the Jasmine Green Animal Rescue series. Her stories are adventures with themes of bravery, family and friendship.

Friends and Traitors is a gripping World War II story about how two girls foil an aristocratic plot to bring down the government and hand the country to the Nazis. When Sidney Dashworth’s school is evacuated to a huge stately home in the countryside, she thinks she’s going to spend the war being very bored. At least her brother must be having fun, flying his Spitfire all over France.

However soon Sidney and a housemaid called Nancy discover that the Earl is up to no good. He has secret night time meetings with mysterious men from the government and seems to be hiding something sinister on his land. They set about stopping the Earl and his evil plotters in this exciting middle grade mystery. At first it’s all terribly thrilling, investigating by creeping about at night and finding secret passageways, but soon everything takes a deadly turn. Sidney’s brother goes missing over France and the war hits home with a terrible reality.

Now let’s find out more about this intriguing historical mystery set during WWII.

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Tell us a little about your inspiration for Friends and Traitors?

After Anna at War was published, my editor asked if I would write another book set in the Second World War. At the time, I was living and working at Roedean, a girls’ boarding school on a clifftop above Brighton, which had been evacuated to a hotel in the Lake District in the summer of 1940, when, with the threat of an imminent Nazi invasion, Brighton was no longer considered safe. I’ve always loved boarding school stories, and I liked the idea of writing about an evacuated boarding school during World War 2.

Then I read an article about how English country houses were used in the Second World War, and discovered that several grand stately homes were used to house evacuated boarding schools. I like to combine different genres in my novels, so I wanted it to be an upstairs/downstairs story as well as a boarding school story. I wanted to have another girl in the house who was the same age as the schoolgirls but who was having to work as a maid because her family couldn’t afford for her to stay at school. My paternal grandmother came from a wealthy family, but my maternal grandmother came from a poor family, so although she was clever and loved learning, she had to leave school at fourteen and go out to work as a housemaid. So I’ve always been very aware of how family money or the lack of it can affect people’s lives and set equally talented children on very different paths.

What research did you have to do to write Friends and Traitors?

So much! I had to research the lives of girls from wealthy families and girls who were working as servants. I had to find out about life in girls’ boarding schools in 1940. I had to find out what was happening in the war and what was being reported in the British press on a daily basis in the spring and summer of 1940. And I also had to learn about British traitors and fifth columnists at the time. I read dozens of history books, letters, diaries and memoirs. I also subscribed to the British Newspaper Archive so that I could read the British newspapers from every day in May and June 1940, when the book is set.

How did you develop your 1940’s characters and their voices so children today could identify with them?

For the characters’ voices, it really helped to read letters, diaries and memoirs, and listen to recorded interviews. Although life for children in the 1940s was very different from today in many ways, a lot of their concerns were the same: friendships, school and family life, and wondering what life would be like for you as an adult, as well as worries about the state of the world. So I hope there is plenty going on in the lives of my characters that children today can identify with.

What is the most difficult part of your writing process? 

Writing the first draft is always hard – conjuring up characters and their world, plus trying to create a page-turning plot and making sure the facts are accurate. Doing all of that at once is really difficult, and it takes me several drafts to get everything in place. With each draft it generally gets slightly easier, although there are still sections in later drafts where I get stuck or lose confidence, and when that happens I have to force myself to just keep going, and trust that it will get there in the end.

If you could meet Sidney Dashworth, what would you say to her?

Sidney probably changes more than any other character in the book, so it would depend at what point in the story I met her. If I met her at the beginning, I’d remind her that just because someone isn’t wealthy, that doesn’t make them less intelligent; in fact, often the opposite is true. If I met her at the end, I’d give her a big hug and tell her she’d been amazing.

Is there anything else you would like to tell readers about Friends and Traitors?

Friends and Traitors includes so many of the elements I loved in books when I was a child: a huge old house with rumours of ghosts and secret passages, and brave, ingenious children who solve mysteries, stand up to bullies, and carry out daring and dangerous plans. I hope you’ll enjoy it!

Where is the best place for people to buy your book?

If you have a local bookshop, please buy it there! If it’s an independent bookshop, you may well end up with a signed copy, as I signed over a thousand copies exclusively for indie bookshops. If you don’t have a local bookshop, you can buy it online at bookshop.org, which supports independent bookshops. Or if you’d like a signed and personalised copy, you can order through the website of my local indie, The Book Nook in Hove and I will walk down there and write in it for you before they post it to you.

Thank you Helen for being a brilliant and most generous guest. I look forward to reading more of your books in the future.

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You can find out more about Helen Peter’s on her website: www.helenpetersbooks.com and follow her on Twitter: @farmgirlwriter.