1. Did any problems arise because you were writing a book based on fact about characters that actually existed?

I was extremely nervous about using real people for my characters. Apart from anything else, I didn’t really know how closely my version of what they were like matched the real thing. If, for instance, Mrs Pretty was to walk into my study today angrily brandishing a copy of The Dig and saying, “This is absolute rubbish – I wasn’t like that at all”, then obviously she would be right and I would be wrong. I tried to do as much research as possible. However, you can easily become bogged down in too much detail and eventually you just have to go with your gut instinct of how these people might have thought and felt. In so far as I arrived at a solution to the problem, I just tried to do it as respectfully as possible.
 
2.  Why did you not mention, even in the epilogue, the iconic Sutton Hoo helmet?
 
Aha... a very interesting point. The reason I didn’t mention it was because the helmet wasn’t discovered while Stuart and Peggy Piggott were at Sutton Hoo. It was found after they had left, and then it wasn’t actually pieced together until the early 1950s. So, as far as I was concerned, it didn’t really fit into my time-frame. I agree that the helmet subsequently became the iconic Sutton Hoo image, but at the time it was rather dwarfed by all the other discoveries. 
 
3.  Did you personally visit or work on any archaeological dig in order to get a 'feel' for your story?
 
I’m afraid not - I’ve never been on an archaeological dig in my life. I’m a bit shamefaced about admitting this as I feel I probably should have done. I also strongly suspect that I wouldn’t have the necessary patience. Fortunately, though, there is a lot of written material about Sutton Hoo so I was able to get a reasonably good idea of what was involved. There’s a particularly good guide book to Sutton Hoo written by a man called Maryin Carver and he very kindly gave me advice and corrected any howlers.
 
 
4. Did you meet any of the characters before you embarked on the novel as you seem to have drawn them with great sympathy?
 
Mrs Pretty had died in the early 40s so I couldn’t speak to anyone who had known her. But Basil Brown didn’t die until the 70s so I was able to talk tot quite a few people who had known him. Peggy Piggott, in fact, was my aunt, which was why I wrote the book in the first place. Although she only died about 15 years ago, I didn’t actually know her that well – she and my father had had a big falling-out. But again I met a lot of people who did. 
 
5. Of all the notorious archaeological digs what was it about this dig that inspired you to choose Sutton Hoo as your subject?
 
My main reason for choosing Sutton Hoo was that my aunt Peggy had found the first pieces of gold there. Then, the more I read about it, the more fascinated I became. I guess I’ve always had a weakness for Buried Treasure stories and I thought how strange it must have been for a young boy – Robert – to have had something like Treasure Island going on in his back garden. What also seemed extraordinary about Sutton Hoo is that these people were unearthing the remains of this lost civilization at a time when their own civilization appeared to be on the brink of destruction. Generally speaking, archaeology struck me as being a great subject for a novel because the manner in which archaeologists scrape away revealing hidden shapes is rather similar to the way in which novelists reveal their characters.