Paula Hillman, author

I had a stall at a local enterprise event at the weekend. The stall was spread with my books, especially the latest, but I only had one copy of Seaview House. I sold it within ten minutes to a lady who’d read it as an eBook but wanted a hard copy. We talked at length about the location of Seaview House, whether it exists, and where I got the idea from. When I explained that my idea for the house was based on the abandoned house in our local park, she got all misty-eyed: she’d been in the house as a child, when her friend lived there. We laughed about the fact that the house is no longer abandoned, and has been bought by a local arts group, and modernised to the point where it hardly resembles the original Sea View House. Which never existed anyway! My latest novel is set loosely at The Black Huts and Roan Head Beach, but, as always, I have used a writer’s creative license to insert the coffee shack on the coast road into my location. You can visit them both, of course! In case you’ve forgotten about Seaview House, here’s the first taste of the first location in the first novel I ever wrote:

August 2018

There isn’t a windier island than Walney, according to its locals. They cling proudly to the notion that theirs is the lowest-lying, the narrowest and the most weather-worn island anywhere in the world. It lies, a beckoning finger of sandstone and saltmarsh and dune, in the shallows of the Irish Sea. And central to it all is Seaview House. The place shimmers in the island’s collective memory, with its squared-off air of importance and its huge bay-windowed eyes. Every family has heard about the fish gargoyles, entwined around pillars on the stone porch. Many have admired the shell motifs cut into its red-brick façade. Most know it was a vicarage during its best years; some were even invited into its draughty office for youth groups or the preamble of weddings and baptisms. Jill Francis remembers every room, each memory lodged as a tribute to her survival.

Today, as hot as any other in this drought-ridden August, she holds her breath as she runs past; the place is on her route around the island and hard to avoid.

It’s just a house…it can’t hurt you.

That’s the kind of thing she would say to her pupils. But Jill isn’t convinced. Trapped inside Seaview is her story, woven into the fabric of Victorian brick and white marble, a story of sea-blue and washed-out skies. She has never told it; to do so would be the end of everything she has worked for. Lucky then that no one else has access to her story. Apart from the other player. She shakes his image away. Most days she can run past Seaview and keep him at bay. Today, the heat-soaked breeze drags him out.