The Evacuee’s Secret – Deborah Klée | Blog Tour Author Post | #TheEvacueesSecret #historicalfiction

A forgotten village. A dangerous secret. A love that defies time.

In a Yorkshire village, condemned to be flooded as a reservoir, WW11 evacuee, Louise Pearson, commits a crime with devastating consequences.

A secret that keeps her away from her childhood home and her best friend and soul mate, Richard, for twenty years.

In 1965, fleeing a dangerous marriage, Louise returns to Yorkshire assuming a new identity. But the village she once knew and loved is about to be submerged to create a reservoir.

As the waters rise, so do the ghosts of her past.

Will Louise uncover the strength to face her demons and reclaim the love she left behind? Or will the secrets that surface pull her under forever?

A heart-breaking story of love, loss and betrayal.

My thanks to Rachel of Rachel’s Random Resources for the tour invite and to Deborah for providing such an interesting guest post below. The Evacuee’s Secret is published by Sherman House (6 June 2025) and is available in Kindle ebook (including Kindle Unlimited) and paperback formats.

Guest Post – Research
by Deborah Klée

Thank you for inviting me to My Reading Corner. My blog is about research.

I love the challenge of writing historical novels, although writing about the war years 1942-1944 was new to me. In the past, I have written about the more recent past—1960s, 70s and 80s because I have some memory of these decades having been born in the early 1960s. I didn’t set out to write a WW1 and WW11 saga (the sequel The Canary Girl’s Secret covers WW1.). It was the image of a church spire jutting out of Thruscross Reservoir in North Yorkshire that inspired this novel. I discovered the village beneath the reservoir was sentenced by an Act of Parliament in 1897 but the reservoir wasn’t created until 1965 by which time the former village had become almost deserted.

I wanted my protagonist to be in a fight against time to rescue something important from the village before the valley is flooded. My protagonist, Louise Pearson, commits a crime–or more a fatal error of judgement, when she is a fourteen-year-old evacuee living in the fictional village of Thorncrest. In 1965, when the valley is about to be flooded, Louise returns to retrieve hidden evidence of her crime. And so, the timelines led me to write a story set in WW11.

Researching life in rural England during WW11 wasn’t difficult in terms of finding sources: newspaper archives, Google searches, books, The Imperial War Museum, talking to people who were evacuee’s during WW11, including my father. The problem wasn’t finding research sources, it was knowing when to stop researching and just write. If I wasn’t disciplined, I would disappear down a research rabbit-hole absorbed in the rules for farms on the production and sharing of produce, the recruitment and management of Land Army girls, and the requisition of horses for war.

And then I discovered Ma Beck, Louise’s guardian in The Evacuee’s Secret, has a secret of her own and so in the sequel The Canary Girl’s Secret, I am off again, this time researching WW1.

It wasn’t just the war years I researched for this novel. Understanding how a community prepares for the creation of a reservoir was important. As this story was inspired by West End village and Thruscross reservoir, I visited the area to get a sense of place and to talk to people whose families had lived through the opening of the flood gates in 1965.

I was fortunate to find many people willing to share their memories and those of parents and grandparents. I’m not from Yorkshire and so it was important to me I listened to people who had lived experience of the reservoir being created and the effect this had on the community. Their stories moved me and inspired a story which needed to be told. Although Thorncrest is a fictional village and the characters bear no resemblance to people living or dead, I have used real events to shape the story. For example, Thruscross Church was relocated above the valley. The pretty church was replaced with an austere chapel and the graves moved to a cemetery on the opposite side of the valley to the replacement church.

Facebook groups were also a great resource. A question on the Harrogate Past Present and Future Facebook group asking where a person might buy a Biba style dress in Harrogate in 1965 had 250 responses! I even found a Facebook group for Fordson Vintage Tractor Enthusiasts where I asked about the mechanics of making a Fordson tractor unsafe in 1944. Again, a generous response with an expert contacting me by email to answer all my questions.

It is by researching locations, historical events, and social history that authors bring stories alive for readers. I need to feel what my character is experiencing to write it and to do that I try to immerse myself in their world. I hope my readers experience this when they read The Evacuee’s Secret.

Deborah writes uplifting page-turners about friendship, community, and emotional courage. The Evacuee’s Secret is a dual timeline WW11 story; the first book in Secrets of a Sunken Village series.

Her podcast, The Mindful Writer and YouTube channel, Castaway Books, connect authors with readers; aiming to support and celebrate other creatives.

Deborah lives on the Essex coast, where she loves to walk by the sea or the surrounding countryside filling her pockets with shells, and acorns, and her head with stories.

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