Author Juliette Mead with her latest book, Healing Flynn. The book tells the story of a war photographer who suffers a lot of psychological damage from his experiences.Author Juliette Mead tells Lesley Bates how she put herself in the line of fire in the name of research.

NOT so long ago, Juliette Mead sat in a bunker on Salisbury Plain being shelled.

She'd already been shot at, negotiated a minefield, learned to make an emergency stretcher and stem arterial bleeding, and made several life or death decisions (not always the right ones) behind enemy lines.

Fortunately, nobody got hurt and nobody died, but the experience gave Juliette valuable background material when she was researching her latest book, Healing Flynn.

Flynn of the title is a war photographer who has accumulated a lot of psychological baggage from his time in wartorn Rwanda and Juliette, who lives in peaceful Wilsford-cum-Lake, jumped at the chance to go on a hostile environments training course to get a feel for what happens when you are in the line of fire.

The week-long course in deepest Hampshire is designed to help reporters and photographers prepare for assignments in dangerous situations round the world.

"I haven't been to Rwanda so it was fantastic for me," she says.

"They do a day on armament recognition, and how to recognise the difference between incoming and outgoing fire, and what arms rebel soldiers carry.

"I found it all absolutely fascinating although I felt a very middle-aged lady novelist in the midst of all these young Reuters cameramen."

Day four is mind games.

"I watched as everyone was ambushed and taken hostage.

"I thought this isn't scary, they won't fall for it in the middle of Hampshire, but they were really frightened even in that artificial environment and it was intriguing psychologically."

Juliette (43) had gone along at the invitation of Dr Gordon Turnbull, a leading authority of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, after she wrote to him for help with the book - her heroine is a psychoanalyst specialising in PTSD.

She also tapped her own sisters, both qualified psychotherapists, for information.

"I am very close to them anyway but it gave me much more knowledge and respect for what they do.

"The psychology of trauma is very complicated and I wanted to be sure that what I put was correct," she says.

"But trauma therapy is also the least regulated so I could let my therapist be a bit of a maverick.

"There were times when they'd say she can't possibly do that - she'd be struck off."

Healing Flynn is Juliette's sixth book.

The previous five have all had subtle connections with her personal life, drawing on her own experience or springboarding from an event in her life.

She started writing after marriage to property company finance director Guy Leech and the birth of the first of her four children.

After Oxford, she'd followed "a classic 80s career" in investment banking on both sides of the Atlantic, followed by a career switch to high-powered head hunting, which became the background to her first novel, The Head Hunter.

Planning a transatlantic house swap provided the inspiration for her second, Intimate Strangers, and her third, Sentimental Journey, was born out of a trunk of correspondence between her mother and her wartime sweetheart.

Jack Shall Have Jill used her university town of Oxford as its setting and the fifth, Charlotte Street, is about her desire for a London bolthole.

Not that there is anything wrong, she says, with Wiltshire, where she and her family have lived for 12 years.

"I can't think of anywhere else in England I'd want to be," she says simply.

She is currently working on a trilogy.

"What drew me selfishly to it was that as a writer, it's very hard to give up your characters on the final page." She says.

"I wanted to have a three generation story and see them all through."

Healing Flynn is published by HarperCollins in paperback and is available price £6.99 from all good bookstores