Hetty Henshaw is the very heart and soul of the Tunesmith Trilogy. Of all the characters, she will stir up the greatest debate.

To the writer, she is by far the most important character in the novels and yet she was originally a mystery to him. He had no plan to invent a romantic heroine, but Hetty insisted on appearing, angel-like, on page 129 of Tunesmith, tinsmith. In Pilgrim, Maggie Stiggle's portrait of Hetty is both beautiful and transformative.

As a fictional character, Hetty at first appears to have simple origins.

'The name 'Hetty Henshaw' came to me out of the ether, or so it would seem.

'Most of the time my brain appears to work by intuition rather than with any kind of calculated plan. 'Hetty' appeared as if in a dream and 'Henshaw' followed soon afterwards, to make a perfect pairing.

'Hetty is such a delightfully English, friendly-sounding name that there was no need to look any further. At the time, I thought that I must simply have heard the surname somewhere many years ago, whereas since finishing Pilgrim I have discovered a number of connections.'

The intensity of Jacques' feelings for Hetty comes across as being very real. Percy Stewart confirms that they are indeed feelings which he has known in the past, which can surface in the calm of a writer's cottage in the Scottish Borders.

'Here most of the time these days there are no distractions, no complications at all, no-one demanding my attention.

'For the last twelve years I have been living on two farms. Both cottages have been well off the road, and in both cases, once I had grown used to the sounds of farm vehicles very early in the morning, I began to feel remarkably settled, just as I had previously done in two isolated cottages in Argyll. I have grown so used to having no-one nearby that it no longer feels at all strange or lonely.

'I realise now that I needed this prolonged period of quietness for ideas to slowly form in my mind, so that central characters could take shape with no confusing influence from anyone around me. It has allowed Jacques, Maggie and Hetty to be entirely themselves, almost as if they exist with no help at all from me.

'Much of these stories is written following a local walk or bike-ride which brings me into contact with other people in Berwick and the surrounding area. I frequently carry home memories of our conversations.

'Following a bike-ride which took me to a pub one sunny afternoon, a few key elements fit into place so effortlessly that Hetty was immediately flesh and blood. Now, two years later, I realise that in fact the core of her personality had surfaced from very deeply-buried memories, of someone I knew in the seventies. Without me realising it until very recently, someone I had met for just a few minutes in 2022 acted as a trigger which released these memories onto the page.'

'This kind of memory-retrieval is why I could write about Hetty's childhood with such clarity and freshness in Pilgrim. Maggie Stiggle's potted biography of her absolutely astonished me, written in a single sitting one morning and not needing a single major edit. Things like this have a foundation somewhere, even if the artist has completely forgotten what it was.

'Hetty as a young woman goes very deep indeed, like a touchstone for the whole of a man's life.

'Firstly, to dive straight into dark waters, there's the tragic character of Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights. This is one of those novels which had a profound effect on me nearly fifty years ago and I suppose that the name 'Earnshaw' had stuck in some dark, forgotten corner of my twenty-one year-old's memory, associated via Kate Bush's song with a beautiful, intelligent, funny girl I briefly knew when I was first riding a motorbike to work every day. I hadn't yet taken my test, but it was a Honda 250, which was as big as a learner could go in those days.

'We were both working in a mail-order warehouse in the long vacation, earning some money so that we could travel a bit before our final year at university started.

'I couldn't believe that someone so extraordinary could live in the same town, just a few miles from my parents' home. I remember that she was a scientist at Durham or somewhere like that. We immediately seemed well-matched.'

'The day I started the job, she sat down opposite me at lunch in the staff canteen. I saw what beautiful artist's hands and arms she had and instantly I was in love. From that first conversation I learned that she was extremely mature, direct and level-headed, without being flirtatious...just like Hetty is with Jacques.

'I would gladly have died just for a kiss from her lovely lips, but I blew it by self-doubt and hesitation, and having L-plates on the motorbike.

'Had I already taken the test, I would have offered her a lift home the next day and that life-story would have written another book entirely!

'Now it is as if we had never met, but she looked and sounded just like I imagine Hetty to be...a beautiful voice, a beautiful person, an enquiring mind, so much promise for the future.'

'Even though I have rarely thought about her since then, she may have influenced my adult life more than anyone else ever has done. In that first conversation she simply felt like the right person. With the confidence which comes from experience, I now realise that we were probably an extremely good match.

'That brief friendship has helped me to write three books with a central female figure who feels completely real to me, yet who is also a delightful enigma because in real life we never even kissed.

'There's even a bit in Tunesmith about her learning to drive, which I wrote completely unconsciously. Funny how memory works!

'All of these things are held somewhere in our memory by words, sounds, images and sometimes smells or even touch and taste. In the trilogy I often play around with sense-memory, and most of what is on the page is absolutely real, even if the context and character are fictional.'

'As if to affirm the value of behind-the-scenes intuition, when I was looking for a second-hand off-road motorbike to add the new one I was about to buy for Jacques' spring journey to the Pyrenees, the very first machine I found was in a workshop I had passed countless times without stopping to look.

'There it was, almost new, a beautiful BMW road bike...not at all what I had in mind! Its number plate confirmed the letters in Hetty's name, so I bought it immediately and continued writing the novel. Not surprisingly, in Pilgrim the 'Hetty II' bike becomes Jacques' second big love.'

This all begs the question of whether the whole of the Tunesmith Trilogy has arisen from a brief friendship in 1978.

'When I began writing Tunesmith, I thought it was the story of a father and son, but then Hetty came into it quite unexpectedly and Jacques' journey took a completely different direction towards the same final goal.

'Clearly the motorbike connection is far more than a mere coincidence, so the answer is almost certainly 'yes'. When that summer warehouse job finished, I set off on my first long journey on the Honda 250, all the way from East Anglia to Tintagel in Cornwall in one day, still with L-plates, with a tent and everything else on the back. It was September and I had a week free before going back to university.

'Now, forty-six years later, Hetty II and I are about to head to Spain with no particular plans other than to pick up some Pyrenean friendships where we left off in the spring, after which I should be ready to follow known and unknown roads southwards. There will be many interesting people along the way.  Perhaps I shall see Africa for the first time, and I know that there will be lots of vultures, some of which will remember seeing me walking through the mountains in the spring. Wonderful!'

Percy Stewart found that he had written over five thousand words on the background to Hetty Henshaw, finding link after link in a huge network of connections of names, images, memories and ideas which have all found their way into her character and her relationship with Jacques.

'Finding so much to say about Hetty 'behind the scenes' explains why I was so certain of her in the pages of the first two books. Now that I'm almost ready to head off for the final stages of Jacques' journeys, I can simply let her weave her magic through the remaining pages.'