The seed for this book came from an interview broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour toward the end of the last millennium with journalist Audrey Whiting. The Sunday Pictorial, for whom she worked in 1955, ran a competition to find a virgin mother, prompted by research by Dr. Helen Spurway, a geneticist at the University of London.

Dr. Spurway had observed that a species of fish (Lebistes reticulatus) was capable of spontaneously producing female progeny. It had also proved possible to obtain parthenogenetic development in rabbits by freezing the fallopian tubes. This led to speculation about whether or not spontaneous parthenogenesis might be provable in other mammals—most notably the human female.

The competition was launched, inviting women to present themselves for research. Of the nineteen who came forward, all were gradually ruled out for various reasons—including confusion as to what virginity actually involved—apart from a Mrs. Emmimarie Jones, who had been bedridden in a German hospital at the time of “conception.” She and her daughter, Monica, were subjected to various blood and serological tests, which seemed to validate her claim, but the final skin graft test eventually failed in both directions.

Details of the tests and their outcomes were reported in The Lancet, Vol. 267, issue 6931, June 30, 1956, pp. 1071–2 and Vol. 268, issue 6934, July 21, 1956, pp. 147–8. Even the doctors running these tests disagreed as to their significance. Their correspondence in The Lancet makes interesting reading.

Having caught the tail end of this interview on the radio, I sensed its potential as the basis of a novel but at the time I was writing (in my view, at least) humorous fiction, and this story didn’t lend itself to light comedy. I therefore left it hanging at the back of my mind for well over a decade, like a piece of flypaper, to see if anything stuck to it.

I had been living in Hayes, Kent, for more than twenty years and used to commute daily on the Charing Cross line without ever having come across a mention of the Lewisham rail crash. It was only when researching the local history of the area in 2015 to see whether or not it might do as the setting for what I now thought of as the virgin birth novel that I came across a reference to it. This was the fly that stuck.

I have had to do some violence to history to unite these two strands. The facts of the rail crash are, as far as I can manage, accurate; the virgin birth story—apart from the seed described above and the medical tests detailed in The Lancet—is fiction. The characters, events and conversations are all mere invention. There is, I understand, a chapter about the case of Mrs. Emmimarie Jones in Like a Virgin: How Science Is Redesigning the Rules of Sex by Aarathi Prasad (London: Oneworld Publications, 2012), but I didn’t dare to read it in case it contained something that derailed my plot.