Elizabeth Winthrop's Blog, page 2

Lessons of a Storyteller

For years, like many children’s book writers, I toured around the country speaking to students and teachers.

Although I welcomed the opportunity to meet my readers, these appearances were not always easy ones. Imagine facing a middle school assembly of 500 restless students when you don’t know one name. Imagine trying to hold their attention first thing in the morning when, happy as they are not to be in the classroom, the kids are punchy, sleepy or just plain bored with the idea of a person telling them they should care about some story she’s written. I learned over the years that silence was my best weapon. No matter how itchy the crowd, the only antidote to disruption is to stand on the stage in the school auditorium in complete silence.  You can feel the waves of chatter slowly ebbing until eventually, the talk stops. 
 
So when I was invited to give a TED talk in Michigan, I thought at first, no problem. I’m used to public speaking. My audience will be respectful, attentive adults. But there were caveats. No notes, I was told. My enthusiasm waned. Eighteen minutes, not one minute longer. No power point show. I began to skedaddle backwards, to make up excuses like deadlines and family pressures. But by that time, I was committed. I was already listed on the schedule. No retreat.
 
And here’s what I learned. Tempting as it might be, don’t write a speech and memorize it. I heard about a speaker at the national TED Conference in Vancouver, who faltered a third of the way into her memorized speech and couldn’t go any further. Her brain shut down. She started again from the beginning, lost her way at exactly the same place, and slunk off the stage in tears.
 
My talk was called Risking Exposure: The Creative Life and I had to tell it, moving from one story to the next.

So, as best I could, I memorized story titles.  Tell the story of Laddie, our beloved beagle, who was shot by a neighboring farmer for chasing his chickens.

Me with Laddie when he was just a puppy

Tell the story of your 18-year-old pregnant mother crossing the North Atlantic in convoy dodging U-boats in December of 1944.

The RMV Darro, the mail ship on which my mother sailed. She slept in a bunk room with six other women and an eight-year-old boy who gave her German measles.  

Tell the story of your father parachuting behind enemy lines to liaison with the French Resistance.

My father holding up the secret number that will identify him if he’s killed in action

If I forget a story, nobody in the audience will know. I can just move on to the next.
 
 Later, it occurred to me that this is also the way I write a novel. Create the characters, get to know them, put them in familiar settings or ones that I’ve researched, and then sit back and wait. Don’t outline. Don’t force them to take this action or make that speech. Once the characters have come fully alive in my mind, they will tell me where to go. My job is to sit down every morning, and to paraphrase the words of Mary Heaton Vorse quoted by C.S.Lewis, “apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” Listen and follow.
 
It certainly isn’t the easiest way to give a speech or the fastest way to write a novel, but for me it’s the most organic way.

Q & A with Elizabeth Winthrop

THE CASTLE IN THE ATTIC

and

THE BATTLE FOR THE CASTLE

Where did you get the idea for these books?

I have two children and when they were small, I hired a lady named Mrs. Miller to take care of them so that I could go down the street to a little office and write my books. When Mrs. Miller left us, we were all sad. So I wrote a book about William and how he wanted to make Mrs. Phillips small so that she could not leave him.

How long did it take you to write these books?

It takes me about two years to write a novel. A year for the first draft, some months off to think about it and then six more months or so to revise it. Everything I write, I rewrite. I’ve come to believe that rewriting is simply part of writing. It doesn’t mean that I did it “wrong” the first time.

Did you have a castle like the one in the attic when you were younger?

No. But I did have a huge dollhouse with a green mansard roof and real windows. And I played in an attic in my grandmother’s house just like the one in the book.

What is your favorite book you have ever written?

I always say that’s like asking a mother which is your favorite child. I love all my books, but if I had to pick one favorite it would be The Castle in the Attic. This is the first book I wrote without an outline and I think it is the most spontaneous. Once I finished Castle, I never outlined a novel again. I try to let the characters tell me where to go next.                                                                                                                 

Do you have any plans to write another book about William?

I am working on a prequel to The Castle in the Attic which tells the story of Richard, Mrs. Phillips’ younger brother. He had his own adventure in the castle, and he warns William in a letter never to go back there because it’s too dangerous. But I’ve learned that it’s not a good idea for me to talk about a book when I’m writing it because the story can slip through my fingers like sand if I talk about it instead of writing it.

How would you feel if your books were turned into a movie?

Movie rights have been optioned for THE CASTLE IN THE ATTIC although no movie has yet been made. I would be happy to have my characters reach a wider audience and yet I feel strongly that kids should read the story first.

Did you have to do a lot of research to write these books?

Yes, every book requires research, especially when you’re writing about the Middle Ages. I visited the Metropolitan Museum in New York City where I live and walked through the Arms and Armor Hall. I listened to Gregorian Chant and other medieval music. I read about castles. I visited castles in Ireland and England. For The Battle for the Castle, I went to visit the rat lab at a local university. I took my children to see the Morris Dancers who hold a festival every May in Vermont. And of course, I read lots and lots of books.

Are your characters based on real people?

Mrs. Phillips is based on Mrs. Miller who helped take care of my children when they were little. William is based a little bit on my son Andrew, a little bit on experiences with my five brothers when I was growing up and a lot on the way I think and feel about the world. In fact, all my characters have some of me in them. Even the villains.

Will Alastor ever come back?

He’s encased in lead and Mrs. Phillips did drop him over the side of the boat on her way back to England. But I never say never.

Where do you get your ideas for the other books you have written?

I get my ideas from the people around me, the places I’ve lived in, and the things my two children talk about. I keep a journal where I put down all my secret thoughts and feelings plus descriptions of people and reports about books I’ve read and lists of ideas for new books. If you want to be a writer, it’s a good idea to keep a diary and put in it all your ideas for stories and feelings about the world around you and the people in it.

How long have you been writing?

I have been writing books since I was twelve years old. I was born in Washington, D.C. in 1948. My first story was about a mouse that lived in the White House. Unfortunately, I left it on the school bus and I never found it again. I didn’t publish my first book until 1972 when I was 24 years old! I have published more than 50 books including two novels for adults called In My Mother’s House and Island Justice. My picture book Dumpy La Rue was selected by the New York Times as one of the Best Illustrated Books of the Year. My historical novel, Counting on Grace, tells the story of a 10-year-old girl who worked in the textile mills in Vermont. It’s received lots of attention and awards including the NCTE Notable Book for a Global Society and the Jane Addams Peace Prize Honor Book.

Do you have any children?

Yes. Eliza and Andrew. They are grown up now, but when they were little, they gave me lots of ideas for stories. Now their children have begun to appear in my stories.

Ian Barnard Hankey

Born Gibraltar November 20, 1921
Died in Libya, Battle of Alam Halfa, August 31, 1942

When many years ago, I started writing what would turn into my upcoming memoir, Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies, I met with the well-known journalist and author, William Zinsserto discuss with him the book I had in mind.  He listened attentively and then quietly dropped a bomb.  “You know,” he said, “you can’t write about both of your parents in the same book. You have to choose one.” I left the room vowing to prove him wrong and two years later, after months of rejected drafts, I finally acknowledged that he was right.  This had to be a book about my mother and my relationship with her.  That left many beloved scenes and characters on the “cutting room floor.”  One of those was my mother’s older brother, Ian Barnard Hankey, a man I would never meet because he was killed in Libya in the Second World War.

One day when I was visiting my mother in her declining years, she handed me a manila envelope. On the outside, scribbled in pencil, a note read “Uncle Ian’s Effects.” For a writer researching family history, this felt like a key to a door locked long ago. I scurried back to my room and tucked this treasure into my suitcase before my mother could change her mind. Lately she’d begun to object to me taking the bits and pieces of her life out of the house for fear that, like her memory, they would disappear forever.

Ian is four years older than my mother and in the upper class British tradition, when he is eight years old, he is sent from Gibraltar to Gilling Castle, a boarding school in England.

From there, he goes to Ampleforth College, a premier Catholic school in Yorkshire and on the way back to school his senior year, he hops off the train in Birmingham and with two of his cousins, he enlists in the army.  None of them admit what they’d done to their parents.

In May of 1940, all civilians are evacuated from Gibraltar so that it can be turned into a military. base. Ian, my mother, and my grandmother board the S.S. Ormonde. As they always do on these crossings, the two siblings teach the younger children how to feed left-over breakfast toast to the seagulls hovering above, squabbling with one another like the children in line below. Ian might look like a child, but less than a week after their evacuation ship docks in London, he is assigned to the Initial Training Corps, Worcestershire Regiment as a rifleman. He is nineteen years old.

In the envelope my mother handed to me, I find the letters Ian wrote home to England from his deployment in the western desert as they called that theater of war. I decide to transcribe them, and I wince as he constantly reassures his parents that despite the danger of the war in the desert and his stepping accidentally on an Italian mine and various other fevers, torments of the weather and the flies, he’s really fine. Every piece of paper I pick up, open, type over and put on the bottom of the pile brings me closer to the last one.

Ian doesn’t know of course, that in the next century, his niece will be reading these missives, but he’s always conscious of the censor looking over his shoulder. Most of the letters are filled with trivial details, questions about people at home, sentences like “many things have happened since I last wrote none of which I can relate I am afraid. Anyhow I am safe and well, although I have lost weight considerably.”

The last letter is written August 26, 1942, five days before he is dive bombed by a German Stuka while attacking a tank patrol. He writes of another glorious sunrise, of the constant flies and a detailed description of a bird. “I saw the most lovely bird yesterday; I was told it was a desert jay; brilliant green body and wings tipped with black and backed with a very light brown. The flight was similar to that of a green plover.” And he ends with this plea: “Remember what I said about the silk stockings or anything else you need; which I can (sic) these people in Cairo to send you.. They are simply dying to (be) able to do something for me.”

The people in Cairo were “dying” to do something for him. In five days, he would be dying too, but not for a pair of silk stockings.

The telegram that announces his death arrives twelve days later from the Under Secretary of War.  

I always assumed it was a soldier who had to deliver this kind of news, but there is a note at the top of the envelope indicating that it passed through the Knightsbridge post office so maybe it is just some errand boy who rests his bike against the front railing of the building and bounds up the steps. But how could that be?  How could the British government allow news that will change lives forever to be delivered by a boy on a bicycle?

I imagine it is my grandmother who opens the door. Her husband is at his office at the Ministry of Economic Warfare, and her daughter, Patricia, enrolled in the Carr Saunders School in the Cotswolds, is taking nine months of secretarial courses to prepare for war work.

The message is typed, all in CAPITALS, on glued strips of paper, the way all telegrams looked back then.

              DEEPLY REGRET TO INFORM YOU OF REPORT RECEIVED FROM MIDDLE EAST THAT 2ND LT I B HANKEY THE KINGS ROYAL RIFLE CORPS WAS KILLED IN ACTION ON 31 ST AUGUST 1942 THE ARMY COUNCIL DESIRE TO OFFER YOU THEIR SINCERE SYMPATHY.

On that exact same day, a world away in a baronial castle in northern England, Ian’s younger sister Patricia met the man she would marry, a 28-year-old American who was also serving in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. I have this strangely romantic image of my uncle, as he was floating out of the world, pushing my father into my mother’s path to make sure she was taken care of since he wouldn’t be there to do it.

Uncle Ian would have been 100 years old this month.

Polecat Park

  Although I rail against the damage I believe the Internet and especially social media has done to our civil discourse, I must admit that I get wonderful surprises on a pretty regular basis when people track me down through my website. The most recent treat came from a fellow whose family lived in a Maryland farmhouse in the years before my parents bought it in 1950.

For nineteen years, our family spent many weekends and much of the summer at the place my father dubbed “Polecat Park” after the skunks we had to evict from under the front porch. I was surprised to learn from this correspondent that Polecat was a fine example of a Greek Revival farmhouse as we always considered it to be a rundown old place whose charm lay less in the quality of its architecture and more in the freedom it gave us city children. For example, in Washington, we children were not allowed to wear sneakers in the living room as we might rip up the ancient Aubusson rug my father had purchased in France. We ate in a separate dining room so my parents could be sure that the formal dining room remained clear of toys and discarded games for important political guests.  And we could never make noise in the hallway outside my father’s office for fear of disturbing him in the middle of writing one of his thrice weekly newspaper columns.

              At Polecat, the wallpaper in the living room might be peeling in the corners and all the kitchen drawers stuck sliding in and out and the back porch tilted at a certain rakish angle, but nobody cared. We had much more access to my father who taught us how to shoot clay pigeons with a 12-gauge shotgun and kill a bass hooked in the murky pond by snapping its neck. We could roam freely through the adjacent fields, explore the various levels of the old barn where the neighboring farmer stored his hay and throw ourselves off a rickety raft into the pond without bothering whether an adult was watching or not. Since they didn’t seem to worry, we didn’t either. At Polecat, as Daddy wrote in a 1956 article for the Saturday Evening Post entitled “Why Do I Keep the Damned Place,” we “rediscovered the joys of squalor, the pleasures of being grubby.”

  In that same article, he described the house as an “oddly shaped termite feast” and “a rural slum dwelling.” My parents’ chic friends had much fancier houses in fancier locales like the Eastern Shore, but to their credit, my mother and father didn’t care what their friends thought as long as they kept turning up for Sunday lunches — which they did. In photographs from those years, Washington journalists, diplomats and CIA operatives are draped over chairs on the front porch or sprawled on the lawn digesting the delicious lunch my mother managed to produce in the squalid kitchen, a feast that was always accompanied by many bottles of wine.

   My parents had a laissez-faire attitude towards their houses: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it and if it is, try to ignore it.  As Daddy wrote, “It is remarkable how much money you can save and how much physical effort you can avoid, once you learn how to rise above dirt and disorder.” 
              For us children, Polecat was heaven and remained so for me, until one summer afternoon at the age of twelve, I discovered a black snake curled in the toilet of the upstairs bathroom as I was about to lower myself. I pulled up my shorts and screamed for my father. We were used to the snakes outside. They slid around in the fields and the barn and under the porch.  Even though Daddy argued that they kept down the mice population, my mother insisted he shoot them which he did with his .22 rifle. Once he pronounced the snake dead, my father would empty the gun of ammunition and hand it over to whichever of his children had won the contest to carry the black body to the dump. It was a job that required skill because long after they are dead, snakes keep jerking and shuddering as if their bodies are trying to restart themselves. With no warning, the thick black rope might suddenly begin to twitch and if you weren’t careful or even if you were, that dead snake would manage to shake itself right off the gun and you’d have to scoop it up again and continue your parade to the dump with all the children on the place following behind. 
              Snakes outside were scary but tolerable. However, a snake seeking the cool of the toilet inside the house was too much. After that traumatic experience, as often as possible, I invited myself to friends’ houses for the weekends.
              I was delighted to learn from my website correspondent that the current occupants of the house are committed to restoring it under a farsighted curatorship program run by the state of Maryland. Curators who take on one of these old houses have “the right to lifetime tenancy in an historic property in exchange for restoring it, maintaining it in good condition, and periodically sharing it with the public.”  Recently, the family who have embarked on this ambitious project, sent me pictures of their children hurtling down a homemade water slide they fashioned on the front lawn. It makes me so happy to know that Polecat is being lovingly restored to its original grandeur, but even more so that the house and the land are giving another generation of children the kind of country escape that my brothers and I remember so vividly and with such affection.

My Mother’s Childhood

Although I didn’t know how long it would take me to write a memoir about my mother and myself, I did begin researching my mother’s childhood in Gibraltar and England long before I actually started writing the book. While my mother was still alive, I traveled to Gibraltar or Gib, as she always called it, to see firsthand what it was like to grow up on the Rock on the edge of the Mediterranean where you lunched across the border in Spain and spent the afternoon watching polo in Tangiers. The Barbary apes loped down to town to snatch the laundry off the rooftops, oranges grew on trees and the breezes blew balmy and tasted of salt.

The Hankey Family in Gibraltar, 1934

I returned with lots of stories and a book of photographs that my mother pored over every day as her memory faded and her childhood began to feel more immediate and real than the visitor who’d just dropped in for tea.

I promised her that I would visit the places in England where she spent her childhood holidays and the years of the war, but as she grew increasingly frail and disoriented, I didn’t feel comfortable taking an extended trip out of the country. Once she was gone, I made the pilgrimage in her honor and in her memory.

My fiction writing has always been enriched by an intimate knowledge of the place where I’ve chosen to set my books. Whether it’s my grandmother’s house in Connecticut or an island off the New England coast or the mill town in Vermont where Lewis Hine took some of his best-known child labor photographs, I’ve learned that knowledge of setting enriches and expands my understanding of the characters in my fiction.

When I came to the end of the first draft of my memoir, Daughter of Spies,(Regal House, October, 2022)  it was time for me to go see where my mother lived in the years between her evacuation from Gibraltar as a young teenager and her transatlantic crossing as an eighteen-year-old pregnant bride.  If I walked through the rooms of her convent school, stood in her grandmother’s Cotswold garden, and wandered the hallways of the Yorkshire castle where she met my father, then surely, I’d better understand the determined young British colonial who left her job as a decoding agent for MI5 so she could marry an American parachutist twelve years her senior, a man she barely knew.

As I began to make plans for this journey, I discovered to my amazement that all the important places in my mother’s life are open to the public. Her convent school in Ware is a hotel. Stanway House, the secretarial school she attended to prepare for “war work,” is a stately mansion open to the public by appointment. Her best friend’s home is a Gothic Revival castle, now open for tours. Her father’s childhood home in Surrey is a wedding venue and office space.

Would I know her better if I walked in her footsteps? The only way to find out was to go see. If you’d like to join me on this journey, open this book, Following in My Mother’s Footsteps, on this website.

#wwiimemoirs, #wwibiographies, #memoirs_of_wwii, #daughterofspies, #elizabethwinthrop, #elizabethwinthropalsop, #wartimesecrets

Following in My Mother’s Footsteps

Although I didn’t know how long it would take me to write a memoir about my mother and myself, I did begin researching my mother’s childhood in Gibraltar and England long before I actually started writing the book. While my mother was still alive, I traveled to Gibraltar or Gib, as she always called it, to see firsthand what it was like to grow up on the Rock on the edge of the Mediterranean where you lunched across the border in Spain and spent the afternoon watching polo in Tangiers. The Barbary apes loped down to town to snatch the laundry off the rooftops, oranges grew on trees and the breezes blew balmy and tasted of salt.

The Hankey Family in Gibraltar, 1934

I returned with lots of stories and a book of photographs that my mother pored over every day as her memory faded and her childhood began to feel more immediate and real than the visitor who’d just dropped in for tea.

I promised her that I would visit the places in England where she spent her childhood holidays and the years of the war, but as she grew increasingly frail and disoriented, I didn’t feel comfortable taking an extended trip out of the country. Once she was gone, I made the pilgrimage in her honor and in her memory.

My fiction writing has always been enriched by an intimate knowledge of the place where I’ve chosen to set my books. Whether it’s my grandmother’s house in Connecticut or an island off the New England coast or the mill town in Vermont where Lewis Hine took some of his best-known child labor photographs, I’ve learned that knowledge of setting enriches and expands my understanding of the characters in my fiction.

When I came to the end of the first draft of my memoir, Daughter of Spies,(Regal House, October, 2022)  it was time for me to go see where my mother lived in the years between her evacuation from Gibraltar as a young teenager and her transatlantic crossing as an eighteen-year-old pregnant bride.  If I walked through the rooms of her convent school, stood in her grandmother’s Cotswold garden, and wandered the hallways of the Yorkshire castle where she met my father, then surely, I’d better understand the determined young British colonial who left her job as a decoding agent for MI5 so she could marry an American parachutist twelve years her senior, a man she barely knew.

As I began to make plans for this journey, I discovered to my amazement that all the important places in my mother’s life are open to the public. Her convent school in Ware is a hotel. Stanway House, the secretarial school she attended to prepare for “war work,” is a stately mansion open to the public by appointment. Her best friend’s home is a Gothic Revival castle, now open for tours. Her father’s childhood home in Surrey is a wedding venue and office space.

Would I know her better if I walked in her footsteps? The only way to find out was to go see. If you’d like to join me on this journey, open this book, Following in My Mother’s Footsteps, on this website.

#wwiimemoirs, #wwibiographies, #memoirs_of_wwii, #daughterofspies, #elizabethwinthrop, #elizabethwinthropalsop, #wartimesecrets

HARRIET THE SPY by Louise Fitzhugh

Every reader can look back and remember the special books they read as children. I’m the same. For me, it was the books my British mother introduced into our home library. They ranged from Enid Blyton’s Castle of Adventure (and the other seven in that series) down to Dr. Doolittle, The Borrowers in all their settings, Winnie the Pooh and Alice in Wonderland.   But as a fiction writer, the books I looked for in my later years were the ones that not only inspired me but also warned me about the loneliness and the pitfalls of the creative path. First among these was Harriet the Spy so I was grateful to be invited to write an essay for the 50th Anniversary edition of this seminal novel.  Here’s what I said.

           I didn’t read Harriet the Spy until I was trying to land a job as an editorial assistant in the children’s book department at Harper and Row. I read my way through every novel they’d published in the previous twenty years. Harriet was at the top of the list.
            I recognized my kinship to Harriet the moment she told Sport in the first chapter that she has to take notes on the people in the subway because she’s seen them and she wants to remember them. How did Louise Fitzhugh know me so well? The answer, of course, is simple: she was a writer. All writers are spies, going about the very important task of gathering their material, and when they’re on the job, they’re unsentimental, focused, indefatigable. “Spies don’t go with friends,” Harriet tells Sport. The life of a spy is a lonely one. I was the only girl in a family of six. I knew about being different, being on the outside looking in. Writing things down in my journal was my way of making sense of the world, from the confusing behavior of my parents to the cruelty of certain people who called themselves my friends to the irritating torments of my brothers. My journal was the one place where I could be completely honest about my feelings.
            I was more careful than Harriet. I never took my spy books out of their secret, locked place in my bedroom, so fortunately, I didn’t lose any friends over what I wrote there. However, as my notes grew into published stories, a few family members began to have their misgivings. Soon after my second novel came out, one uncle warned that “every time Elizabeth writes a book, it’s like dodging a bullet.”
            But I connected with Harriet in other ways. I realize now that when I came to write my fantasy novel, The Castle in the Attic, fourteen years after I’d read Harriet the Spy, I was channeling a version of Harriet’s nanny, Ole Golly. Harriet is devastated by Ole Golly’s departure. My character, William, feels equally desperate when he learns that his nanny, Mrs. Phillips, is moving back to England. Harriet works through her feelings in her notebook. William resorts to magic, but their motivation is the same: Hang on to the one person who loves you despite all your faults. Do anything to keep her, and if she leaves you, do anything to bring her back, no matter the consequences.
            Although I never had a nanny like Ole Golly or Mrs. Phillips, I grew up in a house with a cook named Jessie Mae Jefferson Tucker. Early on, Jessie and I made a secret deal. She owned the only television in the house, and she let me watch women’s wrestling in her third-floor bedroom, as long as I didn’t tell anybody that she often went out herself after my parents had left for dinner parties. I was eleven, Harriet’s age. My older brothers had been sent to boarding school, and even though it was scary to be left in charge of the younger ones, I was committed to our secret pact. Jessie got to go out on her dates, and I got to watch powerful, muscled women wrestle each other to the mat. Jessie and I inhabited our own closed world the way Ole Golly and Harriet do. Children and staff members can feel equally powerless over the people who rule their lives, whether they be parents or employers, so it’s no surprise that they form clandestine liaisons. Children do a lot of their growing up in the kitchen and in top-floor bedrooms, the places in a house that parents like Harriet’s and mine rarely invade and know little about.
            Not unlike Harriet’s friend Janie Gibbs, who cheerfully mixes potions in her bedroom and makes dire threats against all adults, my oldest brother Joe, loved blowing things up in a lab he’d set up in our basement. One time, he got too close to his own explosive mixture and had to be taken to the hospital. When Joe decided it wasn’t feasible to blow up his hated boarding school, he wired the headmaster’s office instead, so he could tape the faculty meetings. He was eventually discovered and expelled, but we younger siblings, sworn to secrecy, never betrayed him.
            Joe always gave us hope that in the battle between children and adults, we might actually triumph. We six were all spies, but I was the Harriet in my family, the one who took the notes and turned them into stories.
            Readers don’t have to live the exact life that Harriet does in order to understand what her story is telling us. Writers will recognize themselves just as easily when they read Harriet’s story today as they did fifty years ago when the book was first published. Even though readers today may be recording their findings on an electronic tablet or publishing their observations on social media sites, the hard truths that Harriet learns as she goes from a spy taking notes to a writer writing stories remain the same.
            If you want to be a writer, write down everything. Find out all you can, because life is hard enough even if you know a lot. Put down the truth in your notebooks, but don’t use it against your friends.
            And as Ole Golly tells Harriet, gone is gone. Don’t try to hold on to people or lie down in your memories. Make stories from them.
 
You can find the 50th Anniversary edition of Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh at your independent bookstore through Bookshop.org or on Amazon.  You might also be interested in a new biography of Louise Fitzhugh: Sometimes You Have to Lie: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, Renegade Author of Harriet the Spy by Leslie Brody.

ELIZABETH WINTHROP ALSOP is the author of over sixty works of fiction for all ages.

The daughter of the journalist, Stewart Alsop  and a great grand-niece of Theodore Roosevelt, Elizabeth was born with a silver spoon in her mouth which has always been combined with a healthy dose of skepticism about life in America’s WASP society. She has recently finished a memoir entitled Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies about her parents’ love affair in England during the war and the complications of their marriage in the politically charged atmosphere of 1950s Washington.

Her previous short memoir, Don’t Knock Unless You’re Bleeding: Growing up in Cold War Washington, is available as a Kindle single.

Coming from Regal House Fall 2022, Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies

The Queen Charlotte Ball

Bridgerton, the popular show streaming on Netflix, takes place in London in 1813 and centers around a family’s efforts to get their daughters properly married.  The first step in that process is to have them presented to society at the Queen Charlotte Ball, founded by Charlotte who was married in 1761 at the age of seventeen to the British monarch, King George III, six hours after she met him for the first time. Known as a patron of orphanages, in 1809, Charlotte founded a hospital and the Ball was established to provide funding for that institution.

The tradition lasted until late in the 20th Century and even in war-ravaged London, young ladies fought to be accepted so that they could curtsy to the reigning monarch as he or she stood beside an enormous birthday cake in honor of Queen Charlotte.

On March 18, 1943, my mother came out at the Queen Charlotte Ball. Life in London during the war was full of ironic twists. The day before, on her seventeenth birthday, my mother had taken a job in the Naval Division of MI5 as a decoding agent for which she was required to sign the Official Secrets Act.

Here’s my mother talking about the evening of the ball:

The QC Hospital was founded for wayward girls and foundlings.  All the debutantes in their innocence (one hopes) were dancing to benefit the fallen girls and the bastards. Even then I thought it was pretty funny.

My best friend, Bee and I were to come out together and her mother, Lady Mowbray, was giving a dinner for us because Mummy and Daddy didn’t have the money to do that, and Daddy was very pinchpenny. I got chicken pox very early on and recovered and then typical Bee, she caught it from me and never made the dance. So poor Lady Mowbray was giving a dinner party for me.

I wore a dress designed by Molyneux, the famous Parisian designer who moved his firm to London during the war.

Suddenly, my mother spied my father in the balcony, sitting next to his date, an older girl in a slinky black dress. He had pursued my mother the previous fall, but when it was clear that her parents disapproved of this soldier, twelve years older than their daughter and an American to boot, he’d given up.  As he reported home to his parents in Connecticut, “they wouldn’t even let me take her out to the British museum.”

My mother wasted no time. She marched up to the balcony and tapped him on the shoulder. I can just imagine the tilt in her eyebrows as she wondered aloud why he had given up his pursuit. Abashed, he escorted her back down to whirl her around the dance floor, which as my mother said, he did appallingly badly. Here was this elderly man with all these young girls. He was in uniform of course. He was a first leftenant in the Kings Royal Rifle Corps. He returned to his date in the balcony, and I went back to my dancing with all the callow youths of the time.

But as she told me later, this chance meeting rekindled his interest and by the time he shipped out to North Africa with his regiment two months later, they were secretly engaged.

Coming from Regal House, Fall 2022:

Daughter of Spies:
Wartime Secrets, Family Lies

#elizabethwinthrop, #elizabethwinthropalsop, #memoirs, #daughterofspies

The Queen Charlotte’s Ball

Bridgerton, the popular show streaming on Netflix, takes place in London in 1813 and centers around a family’s efforts to get their daughters properly married.  The first step in that process is to have them presented to society at the Queen Charlotte’s Ball, founded by Charlotte who was married in 1761 at the age of seventeen to the British monarch, King George III, six hours after she met him for the first time. Known as a patron of orphanages, in 1809, Charlotte founded a hospital and the Ball was established to provide funding for that institution.

The tradition lasted until late in the 20th Century and even in war-ravaged London, young ladies fought to be accepted so that they could curtsy to the reigning monarch as he or she stood beside an enormous birthday cake in honor of Queen Charlotte.

On March 18, 1943, my mother came out at the Queen Charlotte’s Ball. Life in London during the war was full of ironic twists. The day before, on her seventeenth birthday, my mother had taken a job in the Naval Division of MI5 as a decoding agent for which she was required to sign the Official Secrets Act.

Here’s my mother talking about the evening of the ball:

The QC Hospital was founded for wayward girls and foundlings.  All the debutantes in their innocence (one hopes) were dancing to benefit the fallen girls and the bastards. Even then I thought it was pretty funny.

My best friend, Bee and I were to come out together and her mother, Lady Mowbray, was giving a dinner for us because Mummy and Daddy didn’t have the money to do that, and Daddy was very pinchpenny. I got chicken pox very early on and recovered and then typical Bee, she caught it from me and never made the dance. So poor Lady Mowbray was giving a dinner party for me.

I wore a dress designed by Molyneux, the famous Parisian designer who moved his firm to London during the war.

Suddenly, my mother spied my father in the balcony, sitting next to his date, an older girl in a slinky black dress. He had pursued my mother the previous fall, but when it was clear that her parents disapproved of this soldier, twelve years older than their daughter and an American to boot, he’d given up.  As he reported home to his parents in Connecticut, “they wouldn’t even let me take her out to the British museum.”

My mother wasted no time. She marched up to the balcony and tapped him on the shoulder. I can just imagine the tilt in her eyebrows as she wondered aloud why he had given up his pursuit. Abashed, he escorted her back down to whirl her around the dance floor, which as my mother said, he did appallingly badly. Here was this elderly man with all these young girls. He was in uniform of course. He was a first leftenant in the Kings Royal Rifle Corps. He returned to his date in the balcony, and I went back to my dancing with all the callow youths of the time.

But as she told me later, this chance meeting rekindled his interest and by the time he shipped out to North Africa with his regiment two months later, they were secretly engaged.

Coming from Regal House, Fall 2022:

Daughter of Spies:
Wartime Secrets, Family Lies

Following in My Mother’s Footsteps