I’ve just used something that actually happened to me in my novel Kurinji Flowers. About five years ago (2007),   I went to India for the first time and was driven at night from the airport at Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu to my destination, a yoga retreat near Coonoor.

The journey was a hair raiser. The road was full of lorries driving at breakneck speed, with headlights on full beam and horns blaring. Every time we pulled out to pass one there was another bearing down on us in the opposite direction and I spent most of the time with my fingernails dug into the palms of my hands and my eyes tightly shut. Indian lorries are very pretty – they paint the cabs and the trailers in a manner similar to Romany caravans, frequently featuring gods or Christian saints – or a mixture of both. Perhaps, given the danger of the roads, this is designed to ensure safe passage to heaven for the driver and anyone he happens to hit.

I was relieved  when we left the plains and began to climb steadily into the mountains as the roads had fewer lorries – although they now also had hairpin bends. There was nothing to do but trust my driver: an elderly man who, if he’d survived thus far, i reasoned may well survive a bit longer. In the middle of the forest, he pulled to a sudden stop at a sharp bend, where a long train of cars, buses and lorries in front of us, were all halted. People were standing outside their vehicles looking up at the steep bank of trees on the angle of the bend. My driver told me there was a young elephant. I looked up and there it was. An enormous creature. Or at least he seemed enormous in the dark of the night and lit up as he was spookily by car headlights. After a couple of minutes, the elephant, who not surprisingly, seemed confused, managed to turn around and crashed off into the forest behind him. The driver assured me that we had been very lucky – both to see him and to come to no harm as the animal had been lost – split off from his herd. It all happened so quickly that I didn’t manage to take a photograph. Anyway now something similar has happened to Ginny my main character while driving home with her husband, Tony.

He pointed to a spot where the forest bulged out in a kind of promontory above us, forcing the road into a sharp bend. I squinted into the blackness; in the middle of the forested bank was the unmistakeable outline of an elephant in profile, standing stock-still.

I felt a rush of excitement. I’d heard the distant trumpeting of elephants and seen them hauling timber, but I’d not yet seen one out in the wild. ‘Can we go and have a closer look?’

‘Don’t be daft. Can flatten a car in a moment. Imagine what it could do to you.’ As he spoke, the elephant’s trumpeting broke the silent night. The sense of loneliness, fear and loss in its call was palpable.

‘What are we going to do?’ I whispered.

I read in the book The Story of Munnar, about an incident in the 1970s when a young man, returning on a motorcycle from his visit to the hospital where his wife had just given birth, encountered an elephant on the road. A bus full of small children had pulled up as the elephant was wandering about the road. The young man abandoned his bike and went to hide in the ditch, but the elephant was too quick for him and picked him up in his trunk and threw him up in the air and down onto the road. He was killed in front of the schoolchildren. Not a happy story. I adapted that incident and used it in the book too.

The elephant in my watercolour painting above was from Periyar in South India, where I was travelling in 2011. It was domesticated – used to carry tourists about. I preferred to paint them than to ride them.

As well as painting and writing about elephants, I’ve been checking out methods of contraception in the 1930s as I needed to send Ginny off to get fitted up. This of course, being 1936, requires the essential donning of a wedding ring – even at the clinic run by Marie Stopes, the pioneer of women’s rights and contraception  (that’s her on the left). It reminds me of my own experience as a student  in 1973 going to the doctor to get the pill. It was not available to unmarried women like me, so I had to tell the doctor I needed it for period pains. Before writing me the prescription he sternly quizzed me as to whether I intended using it for contraceptive purposes, as if so, he couldn’t prescribe it on the NHS. He repeatedly asked me if I was in a relationship. I had to lie through my teeth or risk being sent away empty-handed. His parting words to me were “If you do have intercourse you need to come back and tell me and you will have to pay privately for your next prescription.” As if the fact that I was having sex cancelled out any need for the pill to help my pains! A classic example of a man dictating his own moral strictures to a woman. It seems odd now as since 1974 in the UK contraception has been available on the NHS free of charge to everyone regardless of marital status.

Here’s a scene from Kurinji Flowers, when Ginny’s mother discovers Ginny’s long term abusive relationship with a friend of her late father:

‘He met Celia soon after at the Slade. He got her pregnant and tried to pretend the child wasn’t his, but her father wouldn’t let him get away with it. Not that Rupert took too much persuading once he found out she came with a trust fund. See what kind of a man he is?’

Before I could reply, Mother’s hand shot to her mouth. ‘My God. You’re not pregnant, are you?’

‘Of course not.’

‘I suppose he made sure of that, didn’t he? Once bitten. The little shit.’

Then she insisted I tell her everything. How, as soon as I looked mature enough, he’d given me a cheap wedding band and sent me off to the Marie Stopes clinic to be fitted with a contraceptive device. How we met when I was supposed to be shopping or meeting school friends.

When I’d finished, she put her head in her hands. ‘I’ve let you down, Ginny. I should have been more careful. You’re so naïve, so trusting, so…gullible.’

You can read Kurinji Flowers on Amazon – and read for free with Kindle Unlimited. Also available as a paperback from all good retailers. Or ask your library. Read the book here now