Aly Monroe's Blog, page 6

Lost Children Found

Earlier this year I blogged about Spain's 'Robbed Children'. During the Franco regime and for some twenty years after his death in 1975, a large number of new born children were removed from their natural parents and 'sold on' to adoptive parents. Doctors and member of the Church were involved in this business and the real parents were told their child had died.

The BBC produced a documentary on the distress caused and showed it last October. (See my last blog post about this). Amongst the cases they followed was an American citizen living in Austin Texas called Randy Ryder. He is now forty but only found out his parents were not really his parents twelve or thirteen years ago. One of the difficulties for children seeking their real parents is that documents like birth certificates were systematically falsified. Adoptive parents were recorded as the biological parents.

The documentary followed him through DNA testing to see whether or not he was the lost brother that a family were trying to track down. The DNA test showed he was not.

It's a tough set of circumstances and the DNA register set up to help is necessarily limited. Of the roughly 1,500 legal cases opened only 6 so far have resulted in a DNA match.

In today's El Pais it is reported that Randy has now found his mother. There is a twist. For a start she is not Spanish but South African and now living in London. Nor was he 'robbed'. For an aspiring, 25 year old actress in Malaga, his birth was inconvenient and she gave him up for adoption. They are going to meet soon.

I am certainly not going to judge anyone but will also say that over 200 of the cases have been 'archivado' – shelved – because the mothers were found to have collaborated in the sale of their children. That's how things are.

El Pais however also gives a case in which a mother and daughter (who have chosen anonymity) have been reunited through the DNA register. At first the mother was both upset and incredulous. She had been told she had given birth to a stillborn son. Indeed, she refused to accept the results of a second DNA test. It wasn't until she agreed to meet her daughter that she saw the person claiming to be her daughter looked pretty much like her other daughter.

It would be nice to say this rare success had immediately gone well. But the mother is now as it were grieving for the child she did not have for thirty seven years, while the same but now adult child helps her through confusion and distress. That's also how things are.

Icelight - in Best Five Thrillers of 2011

I have just heard that Icelight is number 2 in the Daily Telegraph's Best Five Thrillers of 2011.
Very nice news!

Apologies, Allies and Drop Caps

Yesterday I was contacted by Nicholas Blincoe who kindly pointed out that in his ebook version of Washington Shadow my name was, in the table of contents, given as Ally. This is, I hope now was, the case on Amazon, Waterstones, Apple and so on.

More importantly there is a hiccup at the beginning of each chapter. It is 'the drop cap problem'. In the printed book each chapter begins with a very large opening letter and continues in upper case for a couple of words.

This has not transferred to the e-version. In fact the first letter has gone up a line and the following letters are a line down, either headless or, in some cases providing a new word.

Thus and for example we have

C

OTTON

or

W

HEN

I got straight on to John Murray and they have got straight on to sorting out the problems. These apparently afflict The Maze of Cadiz as well as Washington Shadow.

I am told Icelight is fine.

My apologies to any readers who have wondered why I should be talking about hens – and thanks again to Nicholas Blincoe for pointing out the mistakes.

Writers are sent author's copies of their work in print. I wonder if it wouldn't also be a good idea for publishers to send the e-version as well?

Poppies

My father-in-law clocked up 93 last Friday. Yes, he was born on Armistice Day, on 11-11 -1918. Had he been a girl he would have been called Irene. Irene means peace. I don't know what the male equivalent is. He was called John.

Naturally we went over to see him and found him pretty well, though mildly amused by all the 11-11-11 cards.

He was more bemused by the poppy business, particularly as applied to the English football team's insistence on wearing what turned out to be arm bands when they played Spain in a friendly match on November 11.

Like many of his generation, he is appalled by what he calls 'the arm punching' celebrations of present day millionaire footballers. 'Arm-punching' includes somersaults, group hugs and badge kissing.

May I be frank? I don't think he has the slightest desire to shake John Terry's hand.

On a wider level, he is also rather baffled by the poppy insistence. On graduating in 1939, he joined up three months before the declaration of war because he knew war was coming.

He considers himself very lucky, despite weighing six stone when he got out of Burma. His great friend John Wishart died on D-Day. My brother-in-law has Christopher as a second name for another dead friend.

But the thing about being 93 is that you get to consider a long life. And while WW2 was an absolute game changer that doesn't mean you can't think about it.

We gave him Max Hastings' All Hell Broke Loose. His first reaction? 'We're beginning to bite the bullet'.

Now my father-in-law has thought for some time that the Russians beat the Germans and the USA beat the Japanese. The British, apart from a brave and rather lucky window, were fortunate to tag along.

But one of his standards is the deaths suffered. The Russians lost millions. The Germans lost about half that number. The British? However cruel this may sound, surprisingly few.

John Wishart, for example, had four years of doing nothing very much until D-Day. My father-in-law himself says he rarely experienced danger – he only found out relatively recently that the commanding officer who sent him and others into Burma was summarily relieved of his post while they were tackling unmapped terrain with neither adequate equipment nor medication. They were sent out in leather boots that rotted within days.

To a considerable extent, military mismanagement dominated the lives and deaths of the British troops. When my father-in-law got to Mumbai (then Bombay), the main preoccupation was whether anyone had thought to countermand the order to sail on to Japanese occupied Singapore. The ship ahead kept sailing and the Gordon Highlanders disembarked into captivity.

John Wishart really died. He stepped off a landing craft on D-Day and was mown down. And it's partly out of respect for an old friend that my father in law thinks poppies have become as fatuous as 'arm punching'.

Kerosene and Pink Diamonds.

When I talked with Laura Wilson at the Electric Theatre in Guildford on October 22 we touched on the portrayal of history in film – mostly from the humble aspect of how people actually looked, moved and behaved in the 1940s and early 1950s.

I have fairly recently seen two films with a similar subject - a young woman agrees to ensnare an enemy official for what could be called a cause greater than her own physical and emotional well-being and even survival. The films are Black Book (2006) and Lust, Caution (2007). The first is set in Holland during WW2 and the second in Hong Kong and Shanghai during the Japanese occupation of China. Both end grimly, with multiple deaths.

Neither is a bad film, some of the performances are excellent. Tang Wei's portrayal of her character in Ang Lee's film is remarkable, nuanced and very brave.

But I want to concentrate on the look of the films. Let me put it this way - there are a lot of very good looking people, flawless teeth and a considerable expenditure and effort on stylish clothes and vehicles.

Now I have nothing against costume designers, art directors and careful lighting. But a stylish gleam does miss a lot that could inform the anguish and dilemmas the protagonists have to deal with. I don't know how divine details are but they matter and I'd suggest, for this viewer anyway, that they are better rendered without too much prettification.

The Dutch film is not based on a book. Of course it is true that we all bring our own lives to reactions. One of my father's closest friends was a Dutch mathematician. Aged seventeen when the Nazis invaded, his farmer parents were, of course, beside themselves with fear that he would be taken away to work camp or worse. The result was that he spent the 'next two years dressed as girl or hiding in the woodpile.' Of course it isn't fair for me to ask the film makers to have this kind of very grim surrealism inform their work but I did find the sheer silk, well-cut trousers and slightly stressed new knitwear a distraction.

Lust, Caution is based on a short story by Eileen Chang. I kindled this up. Within a couple of pages there is the kind of passage that shows why words can outdo film images. It involves the hoarding of 'Kerosene or pink diamonds' – and reveals the world of collaborators' wives in Shanghai as they play Mahjong. Kerosene was the highly inflammable fuel for lamps, heaters and, for the poor, cooking. It was dyed pink. It illustrates succinctly and precisely the unease of these women: they dread poverty and they need their wealth to be easily transportable and to keep its value.

Ang Lee is very respectful of his source. It may just be I am getting old. But movies simply don't allow the same kind of appreciation of the world behind such a remark. Not of course when you are watching beautiful people exquisitely dressed and lit.

Still photographs work however. In the last day or so I have been looking at photographs published in some British newspapers. They come from an exhibition called "The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League 1936 – 1951" at The Jewish Museum in New York from November 04 2011 – March 25 2012.

I have 'borrowed' one for this blog. It shows a film poster of a book I mention in the next Peter Cotton and has that wonderful boy and tyre. Yes, it's a frame but it has all kinds of possibilities and stories.

My father's tall Dutch friend grew his hair and wore a dress and hid in the woodpile, looking at the mathematical possibilities in curled woodlice. The last time I saw him he asked me what the British had against mixer taps or faucets. A little later he said his main memory of his time in the woodpile was smell. 'I stank' he said.

Perhaps that's the problem. Films can stink but they can't invoke smell. I don't know the smell of kerosene but my husband remembers it well from his childhood in Africa.

London Book Award

I heard yesterday that Icelight has been nominated for the London Book Award, short list to be announced in June. There is a review of the book on the London Festival Fringe website - click here -and also a short interview with me click here.
So far, fellow nominees are Jill Dawson for 'Lucky Bunny', and ~Amanda Coe for 'What they do in the Dark'. More will be added over the months.
Very nice to be nominated.

Goldsboro, Guildford and Period Teeth

Last Friday morning I travelled down from Edinburgh to London by train. Waverley Station in Edinburgh is being revamped – black tunnels for passengers enlivened I suppose by a large hen party wearing small green antlers. Kings Cross has been a work in progress for so long I can't remember when it wasn't.

I had lunch with my lovely editor Kate Parkin from John Murray near Leicester Square because I had to go on to Goldsboro bookshop in Cecil Court. Great as always to see David Headley, who sat me down at one end of a table (the other end was occupied by R.J. Ellory who was signing copies of Saints of New York) and gave me a big pile of copies of Icelight, which are now all signed and dated and some lined.

Next stop was Guildford Festival on Saturday at the Electric Theatre. The Electric part comes from the previous use of the building, now converted into a friendly public space. I am never that keen to be on a stage in an armchair – too static and too far from the audience – but the session went very well. Peter Guttridge was the moderator, as always exceptionally well prepared and skilled. I'd met Peter before as he'd chaired a panel I was on at Crimefest a couple of years ago.

This was the first time I'd met Laura Wilson, winner of the Ellis Peters award a couple of years ago, who has recently published A Capital Crime. We had been put together because we had both used the post-war years of austerity and rationing as background.

Our conversation was easy and enjoyable. To a degree both of us write to show how we are where we are now because of reactions and actions then. It's a living link.

We had lots of common points to discuss, including the use of real situations and real people, that both of us had characters who developed over a number of books, that we had both used childhood memories to inform our most recent novels, that we both used and valued films of the time and that we had both talked to people with a connection to what we were describing.

At the end, someone asked how we would feel about having our books adapted for television or film, and which actor we would like to play the part of our main characters. Neither of us came up with a name. Laura said any candidates she could think of were long dead, and she had a problem with perfect Hollywood white teeth for a D.I. in the nineteen forties.

As we talked of the possibilities of period dentistry, I remembered that after Washington Shadow came out, a reader wrote to tell me that in his mind, Katherine was played by Scarlett Johansonn. If only.

After the weekend, I found an appreciative email from a reader in Lancaster who had read the first two books and was about to start Icelight. He said he was awaiting the film version with Ralph Fiennes as Peter Cotton.

I did point out Cotton is 28 in 1947 and Ralph is a little older. Back in Guildford my sister told me the event had gone well. I believed her. She had bought Laura's Stratton's War.

Who Do You Think You Are? – The Spanish 'Lost' Babies

Tomorrow, October 18, the BBC is showing a documentary on a subject I have already mentioned on this blog in May – the ghastly practice during the Franco regime, and possibly up to the nineties, of removing new-born children from 'unsuitable' mothers and selling them on to 'approved' parents. The mothers were told their child had died.

The present estimate for the number of times this was done is about 300,000. That's 300,000 people of course, now with different names, sometimes in different countries. Doubtless there was a 'moral' justification – at least some of the mothers would have been 'unwed' - but it was also a business, carried out by members of the Spanish Church, doctors and adoption agencies - and money was involved.

There are some truly weird details. Some mothers were told the child had already been buried. Others got to accompany tiny coffins to the cemetery. Some of the coffins have now been found to contain small animal bones. What were the perpetrators thinking? Presumably some sort of undertaker really did put a rabbit in a coffin and seal it up.

Right now there are a lot of distressed people trying to match themselves up with the help of DNA analysis.

But what struck me as odd when I read recent reports was how long the business had continued. After all Franco died in 1975. Spanish democracy started a couple of years later and attitudes changed very fast.

Then I remembered something personal. In the seventies we tried to adopt a child in Spain. We already had a son. I had had a miscarriage. It occurred to us to adopt a girl. Advice around us was not favourable. 'What if the girl had 'bad blood?' We paid no attention.

I was then called to fill in as a translator at a drug trial. In conversation with the President of the Court I learnt I could adopt tomorrow. There were 167 children waiting for adoption. I could have two if I liked. What about nationality? It simply wasn't a problem. Why didn't we go to the orphanage and pick one.

We then ran into a Franco period law. We were not old enough. We had to be 35. And that was that.

When I did hit 35 I remembered this. I then found out that, post Franco, I was too old to adopt. More to my point there were no children to adopt.

And that presumably is why the business continued. It simply adapted to new conditions and provided a service to those desperate to have a child at the expense of 'unsuitable' mothers.

Publication Day, Icelight

Yesterday, flowers from my agent and two lovely online reviews heralded publication day for Icelight, as well as the news that four national newspapers are reviewing - date to be confirmed.
Next stop, Guildford Book Festival on 22nd together with Laura Wilson, talking about our books. If you're in the area, come along and see us.
You can read the reviews here:
http://www.milorambles.com/2011/10/13/icelight-peter-cotton-3-by-aly-monroe-book-review/
http://www.shotsmag.co.uk/book_reviews_view.aspx?BOOK_REVIEW_ID=364

Football – A Question of Culture

I have to admit my interest in football (soccer) is next to nil but my interest in education is long standing.

Last night Spain played Scotland in the last qualifying match for the competition to be held in Poland and the Ukraine in 2012. The Spanish team won this as they have won each of their qualifying matches and Scotland failed to qualify.

Any personal interest of mine involved my two and a half year-old grandson. His Spanish father – his mother is half Scottish – thought this might be a good time to introduce him to football. On one side he had a point.

But the match set me thinking. 25 years ago both Spanish and Scottish teams were at the World Cup in Mexico. The Scots as usual did not get through the early stages. The Spanish did, but then 'choked'. It was what they did. In every international competition Spain would hope and then crumble. In 1986 a Spain-Scotland match was not immediately a Spanish win.

How to explain the subsequent Spanish improvements and worsening Scottish inabilities? Actually, it's not that difficult.

The Spanish school their players. I once heard one of the teachers explain that the young prospects were taught how to be polite, how to use a knife and fork if necessary, indeed taught everything they needed from financial savvy to how to give interviews.

At one level this is the Barcelona set-up in which young players are brought up on 'la granja' – the farm. It's not Orwellian. And the training concentrates on the basics. Ball control, precise passing, moving to receive a pass, acquiring fast feet and, when needed, very fast ball. The other two important but simple lessons are a) - if you have the skills to keep the ball the other team don't have it and b) - you really are part of a team.

Two examples. Yesterday Scottish players had difficulty 'cushioning' the ball on their chests. Instead the ball bounced off out of reach. This is basic. The other was when a player called Goodwillie blasted the ball into the crowd when a simple pass to another player would have been a tap in goal.

Awareness from the players that they are in a team is vital to Spanish success. It's not that all the players are phenomenally talented. But they all know what to do and there are at least three players for every position.

In other words truly talented players (the Argentine Messi for example) come along rarely but considerable degrees of competence are available to any nation that bothers to learn from a system – and yes, improve on it.

Teamwork also removes some of the pressure on individuals. It seems to work.