Happy Monday, and welcome to day two of our World Naked Gardening Day guest posts. I hope everyone stop by to learn about K.L. Noone’s story contribution yesterday. If not, make sure to take a peek.
Today we have A.L. Lester visiting. The World Naked Gardening Day collaboration was her brainchild, and she’s here to tell us about her story, Warning! Deep Water. I actually started this one last night!
We’re extremely happy to have you, Ally!
Hello Amy’s readers! Thank you so much to Amy for letting me pop in today to tell you a bit more about my part of our collaborative World Naked Gardening Day project. Amy, Nell Iris, K. L. Noone, Holly Day and I have all written gay romance novellas based around World Naked Gardening Day, which happens on the first Saturday in May. This year it’s the 7th, which is when our stories happen to be released! You can read about all of them here.
Warning! Deep Water is a 16,300 gay romance set in the UK 1947, just after the worst winter in living memory and eighteen months after the end of the second world war.
Writing in the 1940s is a bit of a departure for me. I am usually a historicals person, although I’ve also begun a quiet sideline in contemporary short stories since covid hit us—concentrating on a full-length historical novel suddenly got very hard. I have a book set in the 1780s that might have babies at some point; and a couple set in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But most of my full-length books are set in the very early 1920s, just after the end of the First World War.
I like writing in that period partly because I’ve done a load of research and can slide in to it fairly easily. The idiom and the events come relatively easily to my pen. I’m about to begin book seven now and I know it won’t require all the initial research I had to do at the beginning; that’s also partly about knowing where to look for things, and I have that bit sorted now.
I think the thing that drew me to the era initially though—apart from it being a hundred years since the Great War when I began writing Lost in Time and me having this mad idea to contrast a man of 35 in 1916 with a man of a similar age in 2016—was that it seemed like a period of flux to me. This was partly because I needed my time-traveller to slot in to the past fairly easily. But it was also because I really like writing in that painful, hurting place where everything is a knife-edge and people have had to make or are about to have to make hard choices.
Retrospectively, I think that’s what drew me to the late 1940s as well. I didn’t want to set it in the 20’s but I couldn’t manage to make it a contemporary. I think perhaps because my setting was based very heavily on the place I grew up and that was fifty years ago now!
So as is my habit, I went backwards. In 1947, mainland Europe was a mess. England less so, but still—it was pretty bad. There were food shortages and bomb damage, people were mourning loved ones and there were soldiers with injuries, visible and invisible, who needed to box up the last six years and slide back in to civilian life and pretend they hadn’t seen and done terrible things. A very definite collective trauma.
It makes it a very interesting place to write in.
Both George and Peter mention having nightmares and I’m pretty sure Peter has a cracking case of PTSD. But because it’s a collective trauma, and probably because of the kind of people they are and the era, they don’t really talk about it. To them, some things are best left unsaid. Also…I only had sixteen thousand words to work it out in and if I was going to go that route I’d have needed at least another twenty thousand!
Anyway…collective trauma and time-travel aside, here’s some more about Warning! Deep Water. I hope you have as much fun reading it as we all have writing our stories.
Warning! Deep Water
Blurb: It’s 1947. George is going through the motions, sowing seeds and tending plants and harvesting crops. The nursery went on without him perfectly well during the war and he spends a lot of time during the working day hiding from people and working on his own. In the evening he prowls round the place looking for odd jobs to do.
It’s been a long, cold winter and Peter doesn’t think he’ll ever get properly warm or clean again. Finding a place with heated greenhouses and plenty of nooks and crannies to kip in while he’s recovering from nasty flu was an enormous stroke of luck. He’s been here a few days now. The weather is beginning to warm up and he’s just realised there’s a huge reservoir of water in one of the greenhouses they use to water the plants. He’s become obsessed with getting in and having an all-over wash.
What will George do when he finds a scraggy ex-soldier bathing in his reservoir? What will Peter do? Is it time for them to both stop running from the past and settle down?
A Naked Gardening Day short story of 16,300 words.
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Excerpt: “You didn’t say you liked music,” Peter said, as they were sitting across the table from each other over a cup of tea, once he’d finally pulled himself away from the instrument and reverentially closed the keyboard.
“Well,” said Peter. “It didn’t come up, did it?” He paused. “Mother used to play a bit,” he said, eventually. “Not like that, though. Hymns, mostly. She was big on chapel.”
There was clearly a story there.
“It’s nice to hear it played,” George went on. “Instruments should be used, not just sat there as part of the furniture. And…,” he paused again and blushed, “And you play very well.”
“Well,” said Peter shuffling with embarrassment. “I learned as a nipper and just carried on with it. Dad wanted me to go and study somewhere, but I wanted to get out and earn. It would have taken the joy out of it if I’d had to pass exams and such.”
George nodded. “I can see that. And you’re good with your hands.” He blushed again and became very absorbed with mashing the tiny amount of butter left from the ration into his baked potato.
Peter coughed. “Well yes,” he said. He couldn’t help smiling a little at George, although he didn’t let him see. He forged on. He really didn’t want him to be uncomfortable. “I think mathematics and music sort of go together, you know? And I was always good with numbers as well…it’s a good trait in a joiner.”
George nodded, clearly feeling they were on less dangerous territory. “Yes,” he said. “There’s all sorts of things you can use maths for; but music is pretty rarefied, isn’t it?”
Peter nodded. “This way I get to keep the music and earn a living. There’s always work for a carpenter, like you said the other day.”
He gradually became less self-conscious about playing when George and Mrs Leland were in the house over the next few weeks. It made him feel like another piece of what made him a person was coming back to life.
****
What it didn’t do was make him any less confused about what was happening between him and George. Half the time he thought George was completely uninterested. But then something would happen that would make him reconsider. The comment about being good with his hands was a case in point. It was a perfectly commonplace thing to say and George shouldn’t have been embarrassed. But he had been. Which meant he’d thought of it in a context that might cause embarrassment.
Peter spent several very enjoyable hours spread over several evenings working through different variations of what the other man might have been thinking.
George was nobody’s Bogart. But he was decent-looking. Nice face, especially when he smiled. A bit soft round the middle, but otherwise hard muscled from the physical work he did day in, day out. Clever…did his own accounts. Liked music. Made Peter laugh with his dry commentary on things in the paper or local gossip and the social pickles the girls reported on in the break room.
Peter liked him a lot. And fancied him. After the third night of considering at length how he could demonstrate how good with his hands he actually was, he gave up pretending. He fancied George a lot.
About A.L. Lester
Writer of queer, paranormal, historical, romantic suspense, mostly. Lives in the South West of England with Mr AL, two children, a terrifying cat, some poultry. Likes gardening but doesn't really have time or energy. Not musical. Doesn't much like telly. Non-binary. Chronically disabled. Has tedious fits.
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Thank you, Ally for stopping by today and sharing your new release! ❤️
And make sure to check back in tomorrow when Holly Day stops by to tell us all about Perfect Rows, her contribution to our World Naked Gardening story project.
You can also learn about all the books that are part of this project in one place by clicking on the image below.
