THE AUTHOR'S PERSONAL NOTES ON The Dark Moment
"My chief aim on this trip to Turkey was to visit and see for myself all the scenes and places in which my characters would be involved for I hate to describe any place that I have not seen with my own eyes. It was a big job as I was writing about the events of thirty years before, and had some trouble in identifying all the places and buildings.
"But it was all the greatest fun, and absolutely absorbing to be getting all the details with which to re-create a period with absolute accuracy–really a sort of historical treasure hunt! The Turks were all mad keen on the idea too, and turned themselves inside out to help.
"My companion and I spent days and days visiting all the buildings connected in any way with Atatürk and the Revolution: his first house in Ankara, his military headquarters, etc. It was all high-pressure reportage, getting early secretaries to the National Assembly to describe exactly how Ataturk stood, gestured and spoke at the President's tribune in the old Assembly Room
The most exciting part of all was my trip down to Inebolu on the Black Sea, to cover every mile of the road that my heroines traversed in an open carriage, taking ten days over it, in 1920. The daughter of a Vali whom we met on the way had her father telephone in advance to the Kaimakam–Mayor to you–of Inebolu who took us a couple of miles out to sea in a launch so that I could see how the coastline had looked to my two heroines coming in by boat and best of all, he sent for some of the old crews who had manned the wooden capstans by which the ammunition-boats were hauled up the beach 28 years before. and these old grey-haired men bent to their old task with a will, hauling up the boats, singing their old chanties, their faces bright with excitement.
"On the way back we were allowed to inspect the famous Ecevit-han–you'll read all about it in the book–from end to end. All Turks who travelled by 'The Road of Revolution,' as they call that long hike from Inebolu to Ankara, remember it with gratitude.
"By the way perhaps I ought to add that though my characters are fictitious, all the incidents which take place in the book happened to someone or other whom I know and who told me of them; nothing in the historical part has been invented.
"Well, these are the incidents, but I can't hope to have conveyed the tenseness, the concentration, and the excitement–mine and the Turks–which have gone to the making of this book."
ANN BRIDGE
---From the dust jacket
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