ED: How did your background and knowledge of history inform the way you wrote The Dressmaker’s War?

MC: South London seemed the natural location for my novel. My parents originated there and my childhood was filled with a repertoire of family stories set in the docks and markets, houses and streets of what they called the real London. I knew that historical and urban landscape, and its social topography. My academic specialism was the middle decades of the 20th century so setting my novel in that period came naturally, too.
I am passionate about history ‘from below,’ so it was natural for me to make my character representative of two historically disenfranchised groups – the working-class and women. There are other communities too, passed over by historians for being the wrong race, gender, ethnicity, faith or sexuality, or the wrong side of struggle, so I do feel that history – and/or its ally, fiction – can help reclaim these hidden pasts. We need these correctives to enhance our understanding of the complex, varied, volatile and fragile social world we inhabit.

Cleaning the pavement like this, in front of the threshold, was a mark of working class pride and respectability.