Former BBC scriptwriter and producer Joanna Toye talks to us about her latest wartime novel The Little Penguin Bookshop and her favourite memories from working on The Archers.
Joanna Toye is a former BBC scriptwriter and producer. She worked for over 30 years on Radio 4's much-loved 'The Archers', as well as on 'Crossroads', Family Affairs', 'Doctors' and 'EastEnders'.
After leaving radio Jo's first six saga novels feature a family-owned department store in Britain in the Second World War. With husbands, boyfriends and brothers away, three shop girl friends and their families pull together to battle the bombs as well as their own poignant personal dramas. Jo drew on her family's war experiences as well as memories of how shopping used to be. The Little Penguin Bookshop, published by Penguin Books on 11 April, is the first novel in a brand new series. You can find The Little Penguin Bookshop and Jo's other books on our catalogue.
I was a shy, quite solitary only child, and my heroines were my polar opposite – outspoken or daring girls or young women, in fiction or real life. I’m thinking of Katy in What Katy Did – ruling the roost from her bed; Jo in Little Women, breaking with convention, or Grace Darling, the lighthouse keeper’s daughter who rowed out in a storm to rescue people from a shipwrecked paddle-steamer.
If I wasn’t reading, I was writing from a very early age – shoeboxes of stories under the bed, and little magazines, modelled on Bunty, that my poor parents dutifully read.
I started as a P.A in The Archers office, typing up the edited scripts on to stencils, first on a manual, then a golf ball electric typewriter (I know! But this was the early 1980s…). I saw what the editor, the brilliant William Smethurst, had crossed out and what he had written in its place. This pretty much taught me everything l know about dialogue, dramatic pacing and hooks. I owe William everything, as he took a chance on me when I submitted a trial script of my own.
Television is much more expensive to make, and there are many more people involved on camera and behind the scenes. Scripts which had to be turned around in a month on The Archers with just one set of rewrites would in television take three months to write by the time various script editors, cast bookers, location managers and directors had (quite rightly) had their say – so it was quite a different experience.
I had Saturday and holiday jobs in retail and have always been fascinated by that world. I went to a small exhibition in Wolverhampton about a former department store, Beatties, which had started there as a shop, then store and expanded around the Midlands and beyond.
There were sales bills, adverts and newspaper cuttings from the 1890s to 2004, when Beatties was taken over by House of Fraser. But the most interesting thing to me was what Beatties had done during the war – an air raid shelter in the basement, obviously, but on the store’s flat roof, formerly just a place where staff went to eat their sandwiches, there was a Fowl Club – yes, they kept chickens on the roof of a central Wolverhampton department store! (With people rationed to one fresh egg a week, if you swapped your egg coupon for grain, and could get hold of the birds in the first place, a hen would give you far more than one egg a week).
I love this sort of detail and, with lots more wartime research of all sorts, it went straight into my four Shop Girls and two Victory Girls books about Lily, her family and friends – and of course their romances!.
It’s been a thrill to invent a new cast of characters in a new setting and bring them alive through their stories. So… At the outbreak of WW2, eighteen year old Carrie wants to join up like her twin, Johnnie. But with her mum not too well, she realises she can’t really leave their small town just outside London. An avid reader, she spies an opportunity to open up a station bookstall. Troops, evacuees and refugees are soon joining the regular commuters and the bookshop thrives, especially the sixpenny Penguin paperbacks she sells, then still quite a novelty. Carrie bonds with two other women workers on the station, and those friendships, along with her close family, are quite enough for her - until a handsome young officer steps off a train and into her life…
The second book in The Little Penguin Bookshop series, called A New Chapter at The Little Penguin Bookshop (what else?!) is written and will come out in February 2025. I do hope readers will want to read on because I have lots more ideas for third and fourth books for Carrie and co. The first book only covers 1939-40, and the second, 1941 – so there’s a lot more of the war to go.
Do your readers know Mary Stewart? She was a prolific author from the 1950s to the 1980s. I picked up Madam, Will You Talk? in a charity shop and have subsequently read my way through almost all of what critics called her romantic suspense novels – two characters in a push-pull sort of romance, where you can’t work out if the hero is a good thing or not. Gripping – and her descriptions are wonderful.
I have a lovely loyal following on my Facebook page. Joy Paterson, in Australia, is a big fan of the Shop Girls. She does errands for a neighbour, which she calls ‘doing her Dora duties’ after my Shop Girl Lily’s hardworking and public-spirited mother.
This is the hardest question of the lot! On The Archers I did have the honour of writing a few lines for Queen Camilla – then the Duchess of Cornwall. She’s a big fan of the programme and agreed to appear to promote a charity dear to her heart, Osteoporosis UK. We went to St James’ Palace to record a short scene with her and members of the cast, which made a change from the less-than-glamorous Archers studio in Birmingham. She was brilliant.
If you’d like to keep in touch with Jo you can find her on Facebook or on X
If you’ve read and enjoyed her books, please do let her know – or post a review on Amazon or Goodreads. They’re a huge help to other readers – and writers, of course.
