Strawberry fields inspire author

By Tanya Gupta
BBC News, Kent

Lewycka is a lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University

A best-selling author has chosen Kent's strawberry fields as the setting for her new novel.

Marina Lewycka's debut novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, was a multi-award-winning smash.

Her second novel, Two Caravans, is set to top the bestsellers on Sunday.

She said: "It's a bit like a dream. You don't know whether you're going to wake up one day, after falling asleep in a lecture hall, with the students having tip-toed away."

Two Caravans explores the story behind the buy-one-get-one free offers in supermarkets, and tells the tale of a group of characters who want to "earn a bit of money, learn a bit of English, and find someone to love".

Dedicated to the Morecambe Bay cockle-pickers, Lewycka's book looks at the experiences of immigrant farm workers.

'Beautiful and hard'

She said: "I wanted to tell a story of the human faces behind the statistics.

"I was in a good position to do that - my parents were those workers.

"They came over at the end of the war. My father drove tractors and my mother picked peas and potatoes in Lincolnshire."

She said: "It was long hours, little money, and back-breaking work.

"But I remember how beautiful it was with the fresh air, and lovely countryside setting.

"I can remember the camaraderie, the joking, and the banter, the pea-pickers with the hessian sacks, and how lovely it was being with my mother in the lovely fresh air.

"It was both beautiful and hard - that was the feeling I wanted to get across."

Two Caravans looks at the lives of migrant strawberry-pickers

To write the opening scenes of her book which finds a group of strawberry-pickers living in two caravans, Lewycka drew on her own memories of strawberry-picking as a student.

She said: "I was in my 20s. We were in a concrete pig sty. I came down with a big east London family.

"We had a laugh. We survived by drinking cider - a lot of cider. It was very hot. We were sunbathing. We had the blue skies of Kent."

But a darker side to the story looks at the horrors of battery farms, when one character ends up working in a chicken shed.

To find out the reality of battery farming, Lewycka viewed videos made by Compassion in World Farming, and researched real cases of animal cruelty which ended in prosecution.

She said: "I peeped through the door of a chicken shed. It was horrible.

"If you go to a supermarket you won't see them, but at local markets I used to wonder why the chickens had broken bones, and now I know."

'More pressure'

Lewycka said she "didn't dare" start writing her second novel until her first, published two years ago, was safely in print.

But she spent a long time mulling it over, knowing she had a good story.

"When you write number one you have no expectations. You don't believe anyone's going to read it, and writing is a solitary process," she said.

"But with number two you're much more in the public eye. It's more daunting, and there's more pressure."

Two Caravans takes the characters from their strawberry field to Dover, the Stour Valley, and Canterbury Cathedral, and is inspired by Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Lewycka, who teaches at Sheffield Hallam University, said the 14th Century author's story about people travelling was a "big inspiration".

Over the next two months, reading groups across Kent are being invited to read Two Caravans, in a scheme backed by Kent libraries.

They will be invited to enter a competition to put themselves in the running to meet the author in Canterbury in May.