The true tales of Marilyn Taylor

Marilyn Taylor is enjoying what she calls "a late flowering career". After 16 years as a school librarian she's moved on to the shelves herself - significantly on to the shelves, at that, with four teenage novels to her credit.

The fourth, just published by O'Brien Press and called Faraway Home, is a departure from the purely imagined fiction of her other books. This time Taylor has taken actual second World War events and woven a story whose characters are based on those of the young people involved.

The events have to do with the escape of Jewish youngsters from their Nazi-occupied homelands to Northern Ireland and the years they spent as refugees on Millisle Farm in Co Down. The characters, as Taylor explains it, "are based on actual people I met when researching - though I've changed the names for the most part.

"It's the most difficult book I've written," she freely admits. "It took me two-and-half years to research and write. I had to track down people and speak to them, research the whole thing about farms and wartime in Northern Ireland and what it was like as well as taking a look at things in Dublin at the time."

She's happy with the result. She says it's "doing remarkably well - with a lot of interest in particular in Northern Ireland."

As career moves go, becoming a writer has been more in the nature of a progression than a radical change for Marilyn Taylor. Sixteen years as the librarian in St Louis High School, Rathmines, Dublin, more than familiarised her with the ways of teenage girls, and she admits she did all her research while on the job.

Rearing three children of her own helped too - they've grown and flown now but are enthusiastic and encouraging about their mother's writing.

"They make very honest kind of remarks," she says, "useful and critical as well as helpful. I like writing for young people and I know about teenagers. Emotions are what I work on as a writer. Emotions don't change, just circumstances. You really don't need to have gritty realism spelt out in a book - emotional change is what works." She hasn't quite given up the day job, however, and has been working part-time in Milltown Park college library for two years now. Books for children have always been a passion: she's a founder member of Children's Books Ireland, and a participant in Books Across the Border (which organises crossBorder and cross-community children's book events.) A child of the war years herself, she was evacuated during its early years and grew up in London, where she graduated in economics from University College London. She met her husband Mervyn Taylor while on a visit to Dublin and says simply that she "then put down roots and had three children".

There will be other books, they're already in her head, but for now she remains deeply involved with her latest fledgling. She speaks quickly, enthusiasm obvious, about the background and development of Faraway Home, about the organisation called Kindertransport and how it managed to get some 10,000, mainly Jewish, children out of Nazi Germany.

"Most of that 10,000 didn't know until after the war what had happened to their parents,"she says. "I'd heard about the Irish dimension, the farm in Co Down, from people in the Jewish community here. I began to make enquiries . . ." These revealed how a refugee committee leased Millisle Farm, raising funds within its own, Jewish community - as well as getting help from the churches in Northern Ireland and the Refugee Committee in England. The farm was managed by a Jewish refugee from Hungary and run on a co-operative basis throughout the war.

THE EVENTS which make the story in Faraway Home begin in l938 and end in l941, when hero Karl is l6. His character is based on a refugee Taylor met in London, who says that "almost all the events in the story are based too on things which happened, such as the football match between children on the farm and locals. "Karl's story starts in Vienna and he becomes friends with Judy who goes up from Dublin to help on the farm and gets to know a local family. In this way there is a coming together of young people from different backgrounds." Millisle Farm in privately owned these days and Taylor has been to visit. "Some of the buildings are still there and the owners are very welcoming. Refugees come back from time to time to show their children where they spent the war."

She says she is "sort of dithering about what's to come. Maybe I'll write a follow-up, the story from l941 on . . . or I might write something about Dublin and the Jewish community here during the war years.

"But then I also have another contemporary novel for teenagers in mind."

This has all the signs of a late flowering career in very definite bloom.

Taylor's first three novels, Could This Be love? I Wondered, Could I love a Stranger? and Call Yourself a Friend? have just been reprinted by O'Brien Press with new covers. Faraway Home, also published by O'Brien Press, costs £4.99 in the shops now.