The House That Kept Secrets: Writing The House on Dunehaven Lane

The coastline near Durban is not the dramatic kind. It is long and flat and warm, with a particular quality of light in the late afternoon that turns everything slightly golden. It is the kind of coast that feels lived-in rather than spectacular — and that quality, I think, is what makes it so interesting to write.

When I was writing The House on Dunehaven Lane, I kept returning to that coastline in my imagination. The house in the novel sits on a lane in a sleepy coastal town, and I needed it to feel specific — not generic South African seaside, but a particular kind of domestic quiet that could hold decades of secrets without them showing on the surface.

The apartheid era in South Africa produced a particular architecture of secrecy. People kept things hidden — from neighbours, from colleagues, from official systems — not because they were naturally secretive but because the cost of visibility was too high. Ordinary houses became extraordinary containers.

That is what interested me about Clara’s house. Not the hidden room as a dramatic device — though it is dramatic — but what it says about the woman who built it. A woman who chose, deliberately, to make her home more dangerous than it needed to be because she believed something was worth the risk. That kind of courage is usually invisible until someone finds the evidence years later.

Naomi, inheriting that house, inherits the question Clara lived. What are you willing to risk, and for what? It is a question that does not age.

The hidden room as a character

I have always been drawn to the idea that spaces carry memory. A hidden room is not just a plot point — it is a physical manifestation of a decision someone made under pressure. When I wrote Clara’s hidden room, I thought about what it would feel like to build something you hoped nobody would ever find. The labour of it. The nights spent working alone. The knowledge that discovery would mean danger, and the choice to proceed anyway.

Rooms like that exist in real South African houses. Not always hidden rooms in the literal sense, but spaces that were built or adapted to hold what could not be seen. A wall built thicker than it needed to be. A cupboard that did not go back as far as it should. The architecture of a country’s history is written into its floor plans, and I wanted Clara’s house to be a document of that history.

Naomi does not find the room by accident. She finds it because she is looking — not for a room, but for the woman Clara was. The room is the answer to a question she did not know she was asking. That is how secrets work in real life. They are not discovered by chance. They are discovered by someone who has become ready to see them.

Writing across generations of women

One of the most rewarding aspects of writing this novel was the relationship between Clara and Naomi — two women from different generations, connected by a house and a secret, who never meet. Clara is dead before the story begins, yet her presence is the most vivid thing in the novel. Her choices echo through every room. Her silence is louder than any confession.

Writing a character who is already gone taught me something about how we carry the people who came before us. Naomi does not just inherit a house. She inherits a set of questions about courage, about silence, about what it means to protect something at great cost. Those questions are not Clara’s alone. They belong to the women in South Africa who lived through times when every choice carried weight, and whose stories are only now being told.

I explore this further in writing women who are not waiting to be rescued — the question of female agency in fiction, and why it matters that Clara made her choice with full knowledge of the cost. The women in my novels are not passive recipients of history. They are its architects, even when the architecture is hidden.

Why the South African coastal setting matters

The setting of The House on Dunehaven Lane is not interchangeable. A story about hidden rooms and inherited secrets could be set anywhere, but it would not be the same story. The KwaZulu-Natal coast — with its particular history, its small-town rhythms, its light — is part of the novel’s argument. I wrote about this in more detail in the South African coastal town as a setting, where I discuss how place becomes character in fiction.

A coastal town where everyone knows everyone is the perfect environment for a secret to be both impossible and necessary. The geography of the place — the long flat coastline, the warm afternoons, the houses that have stood for decades — creates the conditions for Clara’s story to be believable. The setting is not decoration. It is the reason the novel works.

Find The House on Dunehaven Lane at Reader’s Shack — published by Hayshack Press.