When Annie Wilkinson started writing it was the tales her grandmother told her - about her less-than-glamorous life against the backdrop of Durham mining that proved the ideal subject matter. She talks to Women's Editor Sarah Foster

THE key ingredients are all there: a trainee nurse who's keen to land herself a husband, a dashing officer with a badly injured face, and as their story is played out, with all its tension and its drama, the First World War goes on around them, people dying by the day.

This is the stuff of high romance - all moral codes and burning passions - and Annie Wilkinson's new book, the hospital saga, For King and Country, ticks all the boxes for the genre. She's won a plaudit for her skills - her debut novel, A Sovereign for a Song, was named the best from a beginner by the Romantic Novelists' Association - and this has helped to make her name as an established romance writer. You'd think she'd always been engaged in dreaming up her tales of love, and yet surprisingly enough, she says she came to it quite late.

"I tried to write a novel in my 30s and abandoned it because I was having a few marital problems and I ended up being divorced and being a single parent, so the novel writing got shelved for years and years," explains Annie, who's now a grandmother of 60. "Most people get to the stage when they have a mid-life crisis and I thought 'if I don't write a novel now I never will', so at the age of maybe 50 when I had the house to myself I cast around for a subject."

At first the obvious inspiration seemed to be her mother's family. They had been travellers with the circus and had played the music halls, so would provide the sort of drama Annie needed for her book. The only difficulty was, she hadn't known them well at all. "The person I'd really known was my father's mother, who was a miner's wife, and everything that I wrote seemed to be related to her, so that's how the first novel got written," she says.

Though she'd been dead for many years, her father's mother, called Emma Keeble, was still alive in Annie's mind. She'd raised her family in Durham, then when the mines began to close, had travelled south to live in Barnsley. This was where Annie was brought up, though Hull is now where she calls home. She says she loved to hear the stories that her grandmother would tell.

"I was really very close to her and when a person has got an influence on you, you think about them and their stories," she says. "She was quite a feisty woman and in the first book, she's the one who's denied an opportunity for an education. I remember her getting up at the crack of dawn and having the clothes warmed for her sons going out to work."

From things that Emma would tell Annie, as well as what she saw herself, she knew her grandmother had it tough. It was a time when men worked hard and women tended to their needs - and if this meant them being the brunt of men's frustrations and bad moods, then this was just a part of life about which nobody complained.

"My grandmother's dad was quite brutal and she'd tell me stories about that," says Annie. "She didn't suffer domestic violence from her husband, but they all did from their father. When you look at the stress they were under in the mines you can understand. I think it was much more acceptable to be like that then - it's 100 years ago now."

Though Annie had spent time in Durham at the home of her great aunt, she soon found out with her first novel that her knowledge was quite scarce. She knew she'd have to do research and this has never really stopped.

"You're always coming up against something you haven't got a clue about and it all grinds to a halt," she says. "I do lots of my research on the internet, but then there's lots of it that you can't get from there, so you have to go to the source. You ask if you can have books on an inter-library loan or you've got to go up to the libraries.

"It's been completely fascinating - a total eye-opener. We think that we're stressed today, but then you read about some of the things that went on then, and the research gets more interesting than the main task. You leave the writing to go off on the research and you don't want to go back to it because the history is so fascinating."

Her first two novels are based on mining, while three and four - the latest one is now complete but not yet published - are set amid the First World War. For King and Country reflects the job that Annie did for many years. "I'm retired now, but I trained as a nurse and I was a health visitor," she says. "I really enjoyed writing the book - it is, to a degree, the sort of nursing I did. You can discover so much about the past but not everything, so you just assume that they ran the wards with the same kind of routine that we ran them."

In Annie's fictional account, about a hospital in Newcastle, she details treatments of the time, including some that were quite new. It was a pioneering age in which the city played a part. "A Newcastle surgeon called Morison developed this way of treating dirty wounds, because during the First World War there were lots of really filthy wounds," says Annie. "Lots of people died of tetanus and lots of people got gangrene. He developed this way of cleaning wounds with a paste containing a heavy metal called Bismuth - they called it Bipp."

As she has come to understand the sort of climate Emma lived in, Annie feels she has acquired a better knowledge of the woman. She now feels even more connected to the grandmother she loved - and she could not be more delighted. "After having written the books I thoroughly understand what life must have been like for my parents and grandparents in a way I never did before," she says. "It really has been a learning curve."

For King and Country by Annie Wilkinson (Pocket Books, £6.99