Adam & Eve, by Jeffrey Archer

Is Adam and Eve based on a true story?

It is the question I am asked most often about my final novel, and it deserves a straight answer. So here it is. The history is real. The war is real. The date the whole book turns on, the fifteenth of September, 1940, is real, and far more important than most people realise. The people are invented. And the single idea that links them to history is mine, and mine alone.

I had one reader write to ask whether it was a true story I had got hold of and simply written up as fiction. No. It is totally my invention. Totally.

But a great deal of what surrounds it is not. Below are twenty things. Some of them happened. Some of them I made up. I have not sorted them into two tidy columns, because that would spoil the game, and because the truth is they sit side by side on the page exactly as they sit here.

Before you start, here is the rule I have written by for fifty years, which will help you guess.

Everything like the Norfolk fire brigades, like Wolverton Station, those sorts of things have to be real. Otherwise you get people writing in to say there has never been a fire brigade there. You can invent things that nobody can check on. You cannot invent things that people can check on.

So the answer, in a way, is that half the things are real and half are invented. But you have to make sure the invented ones have a feeling of credibility, because if they do not, the story will fall down.

Now. Which is which?

If you’ve not yet read the book, beware: a few mild spoilers below.

✅ Real. And so is Wolverton Station. See the rule above. These are the things people can check, so these are the things I cannot invent.

✅ A total invention.  People ask me about this one more than almost anything else in the book. It is the answer nobody expects, so I shall keep it short.

✅ Real. In proper houses, where you had dukes and earls, the butler always ironed The Times. There were to be no creases in it.

The newspapers were delivered to the station, and yes, they got them that morning. That sort of fact has to be right, because there are still people who can remember.

✅ Real, and closer to my story than I expected when I started looking.

Sandringham does not sit alone. A few miles away is Houghton Hall, built in the seventeen twenties for Sir Robert Walpole, the first man to hold the office of Prime Minister, and still the seat of the Marquess of Cholmondeley. When Prince Albert sent his staff out to find a country estate for the young Prince of Wales, Houghton was one of the houses they went and looked at. They chose Sandringham instead.

Further along the coast is Holkham, the seat of the Earl of Leicester, whose family have been the largest landowners in Norfolk for generations.

Here is the part that stopped me. At Christmas of 1939, with the war three months old, the King brought his two daughters to Sandringham, on a stretch of flat coast that everybody understood was exactly where an invasion would come. And at the very same moment his near neighbour, the Earl of Leicester, was sending his own two daughters away to Scotland, to a great-aunt, out of harm’s way.

An Earl on the Norfolk coast, with daughters, deciding what to do with them as the war began. I had written a good deal of my novel before I discovered that.

✅ Held until publication!  Watch this space!

✅Real, and I did not write a line of it.

They were planning to drop a pamphlet on England. I got it from a German handbook.

It has the swastika on the top. It has the name of the general who would have been in charge of Britain if they had successfully invaded. The actual writing of what would happen, and how they advised the British people to react, is exactly word for word on that document.

I could not have invented what the Germans would have told us. Well, I could have done. But it would not have been very good.

❌ Invented. Though not out of thin air.

An Earl, desperate to have a son so that he could inherit the title and the estate. And on his estate, a shepherd, desperate to have a daughter, because he did not want a son who he felt sure would end up having to go to war.

They are born on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918, the last day of the First World War. You watch them develop from nothing, through childhood, through school, through university. Adam goes to war. Eve becomes a land girl.

They are not based on any one individual. Characters never come completely from one’s imagination. They are a composite of people you have met, people you have known over the years. One of the advantages of having written for fifty years is that I have met a lot of people. You can steal traits, qualities and failings from them.

But no. Adam and Eve are not based on anybody.

✅Real, all of it.

Churchill invented the Women’s Land Army. It was in both the First World War and the Second, and it played a great role in the suffragette movement. When war was declared, one of the great suffragette leaders said we must play our part, you must join the Land Army, so that we can get the vote when the war is over.

And there is one page in Adam & Eve with an advertisement in The Times asking women to join the Land Army. That advertisement is literally word for word taken from The Times.

You will not be surprised to hear which side of my rule that particular piece of research fell on.

✅ Held until publication! Watch this space!

✅ Real, and I did not have to exaggerate a single detail.

On the opening day of the Berlin Olympics, the first of August, 1936, the Hindenburg came over the stadium. It flew at around seven hundred and fifty feet, which is low enough that you could see the Olympic rings painted along the hull and the swastika on the tail fins. It cruised above the city for more than an hour, and something close to three million people stopped what they were doing to look up.

There were sixty-five passengers on board. It also carried nearly eight hundred kilograms of post, which was dropped by parachute over Tempelhof.

Nine months later the same airship caught fire coming in to land at Lakehurst, New Jersey, and thirty-six people died.

I did not need to invent anything there. A government that could put that over a stadium, on that day, in front of those crowds, tells you everything about what it wanted the world to believe.

By FOTO:FORTEPAN / Lőrincze Judit, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49521884

✅ Real, and it is the hinge of the century.

The book began with a speech. Hitler made one in 1940, and Churchill answered him in the House of Commons later that year. Churchill’s words sent me back to read several more speeches by both war leaders, and to seek the advice of two eminent historians, before I had picked up my pen.

The first was Leo McKinstry, whose brilliant book Operation Sea Lion is the story of whether Hitler was going to invade Britain, and where on the south coast he meant to do it.

The second was Andrew Roberts, the distinguished academic and historian, whose military book told me the thing that became the spine of my novel. That on the fifteenth of September, 1940, Hitler changed his mind three times.

Between them, those two men gave me the question. Roberts gave me a great deal more besides, as you will see further down this page.

On the fifteenth of September, 1940, he changed his mind three times. Three times, despite the fact that the soldiers, four hundred thousand of them, were lined up. Despite the fact that the ships were ready under Admiral Raeder. Despite the fact that the planes were on the runway under Goering. He changed his mind a third time and decided not to go ahead.

And I wondered what would have happened if he had changed his mind twice.

That got into my head as one part of the story.

✅Real, and the date matters.

From the tenth of September, 1940, the King stopped receiving his Prime Minister in the formal way. Instead the two of them had lunch alone on a Tuesday. No staff in the room. They served themselves from a side table so that they could say anything they liked to one another without it being written down. The Queen joined them now and then.

Consider that date for a moment. Five days later Hitler changed his mind three times.

So while my two young people are doing what they do in the middle of September 1940, the King of England and the Prime Minister are helping themselves to lunch from a sideboard, in an empty room, saying things out loud that neither of them would put in a letter. That is not something I invented to make the period feel intimate. It is simply what was happening.

❌. Invented. And this is the one I will not tell you.

The biggest challenge, when I came up with the idea, was how you make Adam and Eve responsible for Hitler changing his mind a third time. Without it being contrived. Without it being set up. Without it being ridiculous. You simply read it and accept it.

How could these two people possibly influence a man they would never meet? That took a long time. And when I got the idea, it took a lot of writing, and I was not even sure I could achieve it. It was not until about the fourteenth or fifteenth draft that I thought, yes. It is now believable.

I have had a reader ask me whether it was a true story I got hold of and wrote up as fiction.

No. It is totally my invention. Totally.

The first reader of Adam and Eve, outside of my publisher, finished it at ten past three in the morning, and woke me up to curse me.

Two weeks later she wrote again, to say that Adam and Eve were still with her.

I cannot think of a better verdict than that, and I have been chasing it for fifty years. The most insulting thing a friend ever said to me was about a different book altogether. He told me he had put it down with six chapters to go. I could not think of anything more insulting. Six chapters from the end should be the point at which you cannot breathe.

✅ Real. And this one is mine in a way none of the others are.

Those were the rules, and still are. You did not have to be the first born, but you had to be a boy. I had a friend in the House of Lords who had five daughters, an immense estate and an immense company. He told me the daughters were extremely able. None of them got the title. He split the company between them instead.

Well. I objected to that.

So I brought a bill into the House of Lords called the Primogeniture Bill, and I started with the royal family, because I thought if I could do it with the royal family the rest would follow. And it is now the law of the land that if a girl is born first in the royal family, she will be the queen. In the past it would not have mattered how many girls were born. If a boy was there, he would have become king.

Imagine if a boy had been born before Queen Victoria, or before Queen Elizabeth. And imagine if Princess Anne had been born before Prince Charles, and what the attitude of the British people would have been.

That is the world Eve is born into. And it is the world of the Dowager Countess, who you will meet in this book. A formidable woman who unquestionably, if she had been born a hundred years later, would have chaired one of Britain’s great companies.

I have watched this at close quarters. My own wife had to wait years to be allowed to chair a national museum. Maybe her mother could have done it. Maybe her grandmother could have done it. It was not allowed in those days.

I once wrote in a short story that women are naturally superior to men, and Mrs Consuelo Rosenbaum was no exception. I have not changed my mind since.

✅ Real, and it is the most amazing fact in the book.

The Dunkirk scenes are about fifty-fifty, real and invented. But this came from Lord Roberts, Andrew Roberts, another distinguished historian.

The First Panzer Division had broken through and were only ten miles from Dunkirk. Unquestionably it could have wiped out four hundred thousand troops sitting on the beach. And Hitler gave orders that they were to stay still.

Historians have been studying for years why he did that, when two of his leading generals begged him to allow the First Panzer Division to advance. I have talked to Lord Roberts about this, and he thinks they were worried that the Spitfires would appear out of the sky and wipe the Panzer Division out. I accept that might have been a reason for Hitler making such a bad decision. But the generals were convinced it would have changed the direction of the war, and made an invasion of Britain that much easier.

✅ Real, and you can check it yourself in about a minute.

If you want to know what fifty years of writing does to a man, do not take my word for it. Read the openings.

Here is how my first novel, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, opens its first chapter.

Making a million legally has always been difficult. Making a million illegally has always been a little easier. Keeping a million when you have made it is perhaps the most difficult of all.

Now, that is not a bad opening. But there is nothing in those three lines which I would describe as genuinely original.

Here are the first two lines of Adam and Eve.

He was dreaming when there was a knock on the door. Bill Turner turned over and buried his head in the pillow, still hoping it was a dream, but the knocking ignored his wishes.

I would never have had the courage to write the sentence but the knocking ignored his wishes when I wrote Not a Penny More.

That is fifty years of experience.

The storytelling is the same. It was always the same. What I did not have then was lines like that, and you cannot learn them in ten minutes.

Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less was written by an amateur. Adam and Eve has been written by a professional.

✅Real, every one of them, and I did not know a single one before I read them.

Andrew Roberts gave me the question at the start. Very late in the writing, he gave me five more things.

I read a book edited by Niall Ferguson, in which he had asked six distinguished historians to write about something that might have changed the world if it had gone the other way. One of them was Roberts again, writing about what would have happened if Hitler had invaded Britain.

I did not know how many aeroplanes were lined up on the runway. I did not know how many men were waiting to go, how many ships were loaded, how close they were to pressing the button. He kept giving me lovely nuggets I could drop in rather casually, so that the credibility of believing Hitler might have invaded Britain is all the more realistic.

Two of them shook me.

The first. Anthony Eden made a broadcast saying there was a possibility we might be invaded, and asked for volunteers to come forward and defend their country. The Americans sent one million four hundred thousand rifles over. And one million five hundred and seventy-seven thousand men and women applied to join.

We have a tendency, because of the very successful Dad’s Army, to imagine they were all a bit amateur and jokey. This is not true. They were incredibly brave and willing to risk their lives.

The second. On the beaches of England, right the way from Dover through to Plymouth, pillboxes were already set up. People were in place, waiting for them to come. And Churchill had even decided that he would be there with them.

✅Real, and this is why I wrote the book.

We tell ourselves a comfortable story about 1940. A plucky island, a few heroic pilots, and a happy ending. The truth is more frightening.

Britain came far closer to defeat than the legend allows. That is not a novelist’s licence. That is history. Once I understood how thin the margin really was, I could not put the subject down.

✅Held until after publication! Watch this space!

A NOTE ON THE DEDICATION

Adam & Eve is dedicated to Deborah Owen.

She was the agent who took my first novel, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, to fifteen publishers and was turned down fifteen times in a row, and who refused to give up on it. She took me through to Kane and Abel, which changed my whole life. She is still very much alive and kicking.

Fifty years, and thirty-one novels later, it seemed to me there was only one name that belonged at the front of the last one.

I did not learn 1940 from facts alone. I learned what it felt like from other novelists. What it was to queue for bread, to listen to a forbidden broadcast, to fall in love behind blackout curtains. See the two new reading lists below, full of the books that taught me, and that shaped Adam and Eve.