A little about Roger J Green, in his own words . . . continued
I have always enjoyed writing stories that are set in Victorian times because I think I have had some of the experiences of a child living in Victorian England. And of course my Grandmother and all older people I knew as a child had all been born in the reign of Queen Victoria, one of my novels, THE HIDDEN HAND is a thriller and a ghost story set in Victorian Sheffield. The first two novels I wrote, THE FEAR OF SAMUEL WALTON and THE LENGTHENING SHADOW were ghost stories set in the Derbyshire of Victorian times. My father had been a gardener at Ashford Hall and at Castle Hill at Bakewell when it was a private mansion belonging to the Blake family. My Grandmother had left home at the age of 12 to become a kitchen maid in 1892 I heard lots of stories about being a servant in a big house and this gave me ideas for two of my early books THE DEVIL FINDS WORK and THEY WATCHED HIM DIE.
But most of all it was and is the power of adults over children that fascinated and fascinates me. It was very easy for adults to do more or less as they pleased in Victorian times. I wrote about a girl wrongly accused of murder and sentenced to hang in THE THROTTLEPENNY MURDER and a similar story in DAGGERS where a young girl is too scared to own up to an accidental death and keeps quiet when someone else is blamed for it. Of course bullying and the wrong use of power is not confined to Victorian times. I was a teacher for twenty eight years and in CUCKOOS I wrote about the power one boy in a class exercised over all the other children, parents and teachers - in other words bullying.
