It was only when I worked out what caused the ghostly voices to speak that I realised I had an intergenerational story. At that time, 2004, I could have easily set it between the then present and forty years before. However, it occurred to me that some aspects of the mystery could easily be resolved by a quick Google search, so I decided I needed to set it in pre-internet days. When I took it back to 1990, the previous era immediately became World War 2, and I quickly saw that I could draw some historical parallels about war and conflict.
Initially, I planned to write the book switching between Ruth in 1990 and Elsie in 1942. However, as I was working out the plot, I discovered the only way I could understand what Elsie was going through was to go back a further generation. Rachel arrived in 1911 and I saw that her story needed to be told in its entirety for the rest of it to make sense. At the time I was watching ‘Who Do You Think You Are’ on television. I liked the format of going back down someone’s family tree and then coming back in the present. I also had just read ‘Cloud Atlas’ by David Mitchell and enjoyed the way he’d embedded stories within stories. So I chose this format for ‘Echo Hall’. Beginning with Ruth in 1990, we go back to Elsie in 1942, then join Rachel between 1911 and 1924, before finishing Elsie’s story in 1942 and returning to Ruth in 1991 where the last secrets are exposed. Very late in the day, I added a prologue and epilogue in 2014, with Ruth’s daughter Phoebe visiting ‘Echo Hall’ 100 years after world war 1, as a way of setting the scene and themes of the novel.
