The Backstory

I am often asked how ideas for a book emerge. Have You Eaten Rice Today? has been fermenting for years, probably way before I decided I wanted to write books. So how far back shall I go? That’s the question. I suppose to when memories are mine and not those of others nudged to the surface by others, or photos, or books.

I’ve had a most fortunate life.

Snapshots flicker through of being a little girl in Nigeria. I remember being woken in the middle of the night by my mother because we had to evacuate the house as the one next door was a blazing pyre. I remember the smell and infernal noise. Our house did not burn. I also have happy memories, mostly centered around our last home, in Aba, our animals and the men who made our lives infinitely easier — Ali and Sam, the cook and houseboy who spoilt me and from whom I learnt much.

There were brief interludes in England where I resented being sent to a village school – an outsider in the country of my birth.

And then Malaysia.

The excitement when the P&O ship, SS Chitral, docked at Port Swettenham and Dad waving from the wharf as Mum and I waited to disembark after three weeks at sea. The warmth, the smells, the clutter of people, whilst not Africa, felt so much more me than the cool damp of a rural England. Even at six.
As the years in both Singapore and Malaysia — ten in total — added up and I reached adolescence, the stories of my parents’ meeting in the jungles of Pahang during the communist uprising known as the Emergency of the late 1940’s and ’50s, became the romantic backdrop to the country I then considered home.

My parents met on a road deep in bandit country. My father’s Jeep had broken down. My mother’s ran smoothly. He, an officer seconded to the Malay Regiment from the British Army, refused to leave his pistol. She a tall, attractive and very pragmatic Australian nurse working for the Red Cross refused to allow a weapon in her vehicle. So she left him stranded, although did leave word of his whereabouts at the next military post. Perhaps that meeting should have warned them of a volatile life ahead. As well as being a soldier, Dad was a poet, a dreamer, a man who loved to be in love. My mother was the opposite, a realist who nonetheless fell in love with the much younger man.

They left Malaya, as it still was, in 1955 and returned in 1964 with me in tow. Dad no longer a soldier, but a businessman; Mum no longer a nurse but deeply involved with the Malaysian Red Cross.
School was a melange of colours, creeds and cultures. What better way to learn about the world? Then in 1969, it was decided educational stability was needed and so I went to boarding school in Australia – an outsider in the country of my mother’s birth.

But I adapted and enjoyed the benefits of an Australian education, not just at school. And as an impressionable teenager home for the holidays, my parents’ story fascinated me. It emerged, not in one fell swoop but in dribs and drabs. I remember going to the Port Dickson Club where the manager knew Dad from his army days. We stayed at the Rest House in Raub, the village in which Mum ran a clinic — a detour on the way to the Cameroon Highlands to pick strawberries during a week’s local leave. During the Emergency, Mum also set up a clinic on the west coast of Malaya just north of Port Dickson in Tanjong Sepat – about the only place in Have You Eaten Rice Today? that is not mentioned. But it was from the townsfolk there she received the medallion with the words I stole for Dee’s present from the people of Raub.

Fire came again into my life when, one sultry night in December 1970, standing on the padang across from the Dog — The Royal Selangor Club — we watched it burn down. We had been there for dinner and carol singing. I remember the smell and the infernal noise.

After seven years in Kuala Lumpur, a slice of my heart will always be in Malaysia. The last time I visited I stood on where I calculated our house had been. A lovely old black and white torn down to make way for the Petronas Towers. I cried.

So many memories. Mine interwoven with those of my parents. But Have You Eaten Rice Today? is not my parents’ story, although I have stolen freely from their anecdotes, their papers and photographs which merged into the book of my imagination.

Dee, a delightful sprite of a character, did not come from Armidale – the town of my mother’s birth — but from Townsville in Queensland. Simon, an ex-soldier and retired rubber planter, is not my father although I have drawn from him as far as speech and a partiality to whisky is concerned. Dad did not know one end of a hoe from the other but did speak multiple languages, including Malay and Cantonese. Max. What can I say about Max? A young man searching for his own story.

London, and Dorset in the south west of England, are places I know well. I have been to Hell, and had a delicious pub lunch in Chetnole. I’ve climbed Bubb Down, and visited the church at Melbury Bubb to marvel at the rather extraordinary font with a frieze of a stag, a lion and a wolf carved from an upturned base of an Anglo-Saxon cross.

Research is a delight. The tricky part for any writer is to know when to stop adding the fascinating tidbits we come across as we delve into the past.

Or just when to stop!

Where to Write?

It’s tax day in America.

Pushing the button that will send proof of a valid working life to the Inland Revenue Service is the culmination of days entering numbers in the correct boxes. It is a time of stark truths as those crunched numbers deliver the brutal realisation that, despite hours each day spent on the foundation of a chosen career, the three ‘Rs’ – researching, reading and ’riting – do not provide enough for the smallest garret in the least expensive city of the world. TimeOut.com tells me that for 2022 that city would be Manchester, England. Montreal, Budapest and Johannesburg would be my next three equal options. It’s an interesting list that stops at ten. St Petersburg, Prague and Porto are next, followed by Rome, Mexico City and Bangkok.

St Croix, where I currently reside, does not feature. It is not surprising. Living on an island is naturally a costly option. Having lived on a couple before – Singapore and Bioko, in the Bight of Biafra – it is perhaps something I should’ve taken into account when searching for the ideal retirement place. Retirement for my husband but not me. I’m a writer, a novelist, remember?

Out of that august list of inexpensive places I admit a couple of cities do rather appeal. Bangkok, the birthplace of my son, Edward, will always hold a large slice of my heart. Living la dolce vita in Rome does tempt me although as I’m in the throes of writing a novel based in Venice – there you go, anotherisland – it would seem the wrong option.

Budapest would entice me with its boulevards and the Danube, but Hungary is ruled by a president whose ideas on democracy do not marry to my own. It is many years since I visited Mexico City but a metropolis of over nine million people seems a bit crowded. Johannesburg. No. If I am to live in South Africa it would have to be closer to the splendours of the Drakensberg Range. The magnificence of St Petersburg could be an option but winter would be a problem – all that marble and drafty halls. And I do have an issue with Russia’s leadership. The two Ps, Prague and Porto, both appeal but I would need to do a little information mining, and there is of course the small issue of not speaking a word of Czech or Portuguese, but then I didn’t speak Thai when I moved there so that problem is not insurmountable.

I wonder how difficult it is to learn the tax code in these least expensive cities of the world? And what guaranteed do I have that in 2023 their cost of living won’t have rocketed due to people like me trying to sustain a living as a writer.

Maybe Canada would be similar to the US. And at least I speak the lingo. That being the case perhaps Montreal – the city favoured by Hollywood moguls as the ideal place to shoot movies. It’s not somewhere I have been but I’ve seen the photos of snow-covered streets. And men in earflaps. No, if I’m to live in a garret on a limited income, the thought of winter does not fill me with warmth.
I might sound English but my knowledge of the country is limited mostly to London and the West Country, and of Manchester I know little apart from Man City and Man U teams – and football is not a game that interests me. Textiles, canals and railways alway intrigue – there’s history on the doorstep – but language could again be an issue.

English comes in many shades – this is a lesson I learnt whilst living in the North East of Scotland where my use of ‘sorry, could you say that again’ became tedious. Mancunian might hold the same problem but I like black pudding and eccles cake so maybe I should put the city on a narrowing list of possibilities as I consider my options of attic living.

Or maybe I’ll just stay where I am. On an idyllic island in the Caribbean where my husband is gracious enough to support my writing, and in the belief that each new book I write is bound to be a best seller. And really, how many people can sit at a desk purportedly writing, or at least thinking of writing, whilst watching frigate birds soar and yachts manoeuvre into the crystalline harbour?

I have to believe that one day my tax report will show a healthy income, but then again, if that happens the taxman might cometh!

Loneliness of Failure

I’ve said in the past, I might even have written it, that writing is a lonely business. I was wrong.

Writing is solitary, not lonely. When I sit at my computer, or even pick up a pen, I am transported somewhere, whether in time or place. Sometimes I cry as I type, sometimes I laugh, always I am engaged. The characters become real – their loves, their lives, their dreams, their idiosyncrasies. The hours fly by and, if I am in the house on my own, I might miss coffee, lunch and tea though, it must be said, rarely do I miss a glass of wine. But by that time the sun has set and I am nudged to rejoin the real world by the arrival of darkness and sometimes Bonnie, our deaf cat, yowling to be fed.

My solitariness is a privilege. Granted with grace by my husband as I spend day after day in my imagination and on my computer. And when the first draft is complete, I go back and attempt to fill the pages with SPICE. An acronym coined by my first publisher, Jo Parfitt of Summertime Publishing http://www.summertimepublishing.com. SPICE is what fills the writing with Specifics, Place, Incident, Characters and that most important of condiments, Emotion. SPICE is what makes the reader want, need, to turn the page – to read until dawn.

Initial edits are then made and, as the wait for comments from Beta readers stretches into weeks, I begin another story. I put that new world down to return to the novel that has filled my life for months and months. A rewrite follows, which is never a chore because I am once again embroiled in the lives of my characters. I delete. I add. I edit. I tweak until even I recognize it is time to let go. For now.

Filled with hope, I think of the words of Iranian-American young adult author, Tahereh Mafi, “Hope. It’s a fresh rain, a whispered promise, a cloudless sky, the perfect punctuation mark at the end of a sentence,” then I send the manuscript out in its search for a literary agent. That in itself is a job. 

Each agent requires systematic analysis into their likes and dislikes, their ‘wants’ and not ‘interested ins’. As I troll through pages of names I recognize my many flaws. No, I am not drawing on a tragic background as I weave my tales. No, I’m not part of the LGBTQ community. No, I’m not black, though a large part of my life has been spent in Africa. No, I’m not brown, though another chunk of years was spent in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. No, technically I don’t live in England, though it is my birth country and my father was British and part of my heart is embedded in the rolling Dorset hills, and in pre-COVID days I travelled there regularly. No, I don’t live in Australia but I spent seven years at boarding school in Armidale, New South Wales, and my mother was Australian …. and a large part of my heart is there too – but I’ve left slivers of heart in all the places I have lived. No, technically I’m not American though I am a citizen. No, I’m not from the Caribbean but I currently live there. Yes, I write English English but hey, I can adapt.

The pundits say write what you know. 

So what am I? What do I know?

I am a global nomad. I know the joys and challenges of relocating around the world. Of the isolation, tinged with excitement, of being the new arrival, again. Of living a sometimes disconnected life. And of feeling the agonies of guilt when we aren’t present for final moments, or weddings or births and birthdays. Of knowing the importance of saying good goodbyes in order to welcome the hello, the ‘mahnin, the sawadee-ka, the selemat pagi of a new country. Those are the emotions I draw on, those elements of spice that come from living and working in different countries and cultures, of learning new histories. That combined with a wondering, and wandering, imagination is what goes into my writing.

Novelist W. Somerset Maugham said, “There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” I suppose the closest thing to a rule is the axiom most writers live by – ‘show, don’t tell’. But aren’t rules made to be broken? There really are times when ‘tell’ is the only option, and please excuse the following example, but sometimes an apple is just an apple. Sure, there are variations in colour, size and texture but there seems little need to describe the orb that falls from trees.

Christian Nestell Bovee, C N, to his pals, was an epigrammatic New York City writer who said, “There is probably no hell for authors in the next world – they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this one.” 

Whilst I don’t suffer from writing, and nor do I consider it a lonely occupation, I can state that waiting for agent responses is harrowing. And believe me when I say, once received, rejection is the loneliest business. Sympathy, and sometimes empathy, from friends and fellow writers eases the sting of rejection and, despite agent’s letters assuring hope may be found elsewhere but ‘this book is not for me,’ the failure is a most lonely affair. 

It is a jolt to the heart, a dart speared into the imagination, and all we can do is wallow for a sentence, maybe a paragraph then write on and think of Sylvia Plath’s admonition, “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

Hope once again accompanies our solitary days.

Hold Fast to Dreams….

‘Hope’ is an invigorating word that should be high in every writer’s lexicon. Hope that an agent, then a publisher, then the reading public will like their story. ‘Belief’ is another sustaining word. Belief that after countless hours at a desk that same agent, publisher, and public will indeed revel in the story woven from the writer’s research and imagination.

I have been working on a novel which was to be the first of a trilogy – the second and third are written and published – Fireburn and Transfer. Thank you, OC Publishing, and thank you for believing in me enough to agree to publish the next – with a working title of Emancipation. A hopeful title. It was only later, when I envisaged three spines standing side by side that I realised they would read EFT which, depending on how one’s mind works, could be either a juvenile newt or an electronic funds transfer. Neither very catchy for a boxed set, but I hoped readers would get over that.

Emancipation started with the Portuguese royal family’s arrival in Brazil after fleeing Napoleon’s encroaching army. It told how Anna Clausen’s grandfather accompanied the Prince Regent to Rio and how, as a consequence, he came into his fortune which, in turn, lead to Anna’s Fancy, his sugar plantation on St Croix in the Danish West Indies. It was a hopeful book because it revolved around the ‘rightness’ of emancipation. On reflection, I should have called the book Manumission. I don’t think there is an anagram for MFT.

The title is however a moot point.

I knew I could write about freedom. I know I can write about violence. What I hadn’t realised was that I would struggle to write about sustained cruelty. Graham Greene said that in order to write dispassionately, “A writer must be able to retain a splinter of ice in the heart.” Barry Unsworth in Sacred Hunger was able to delve into the tragedy of slavery and write a riveting book. Marlon James did the same in The Book of Night Women. Whilst not putting myself into the same lofty realms of either author, I have found that Apple Gidley cannot retain that splinter on certain subjects. Part of me is pleased. I don’t want to become inured to horror.

My books are character driven. As I research, characters form. Their backstory becomes part of the plot in minute ways. For example, Anna’s favourite colour is yellow because it reminds her of the glow of the Caribbean sun, or the centre of a white frangipani, and it brings her joy. The character’s foibles, their idiosyncrasies, make them real to me and, hopefully, the reader.

Every story needs tension, so not all characters have to be likable but I have to care about the majority of them. The coffee mat on my desk, courtesy of my son, reads, “Please do not annoy the writer, she may put you in a book and kill you.” It’s true. I had great pleasure killing off Anna’s husband, Carl, in Fireburn, but I can’t murder everybody – I’d be writing slasher novels and not historical fiction. 

And that brings me back to hope. Emancipation was truly a time of hope but the more I wrote the less hopeful I felt. That could be a product of what is happening in America today. I’ve been immersed in writing about the issues of racial inequality 200 years ago, and here we are in 2020 seeing how relatively little has changed and it has made me sick to my stomach. I am well aware I’m not alone in that feeling. An email from an African American friend has been churning in my head the last couple of days. After the outrage in Minneapolis he asked, “Where is God when you need him?” He then asked me to excuse his rage. He is indeed a gracious man, always, but particularly in the face of current events when hope seems hard to come by.

That all sounds pretentious. I don’t mean to be. The Swiss-born, British philosopher, Alain de Botton, says “The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.” I was at the despair stage.

So, this morning I wrote to my publisher and said Emancipation is no more. Then I filed all my research notes and put away reference books that have been stacked on my desk, sticky tags in varying colours forming a frill on each book. Usually the process makes me a little sad. A year invested in my characters, my imagination, shelved, but today I felt relief. 

I have failed in a way but hope is once again returning to my lexicon because now, as I think of Langston Hughes’ words, I am smiling at the thought of the next book to be written.

"Hold fast to dreams, 
For if dreams die 
Life is a broken-winged bird, 
That cannot fly.” 

Words we should hold close in these seemingly hopeless and difficult times.

Paris – ooh la la!

I came to a staggering stop, gasping to catch my breath as another forty or so steps glared down at me. The chill of a Parisian November afternoon felt at the bottom of the hill had given way to an unpleasant clamminess and I loosened my scarf, undid my coat, and tugged at the neckline of my woolen sweater. I even dispensed with my gloves. Gathering what small amount of fortitude I had remaining, I hauled myself ever upwards. The effort was worth it. In the 38 years since my last adventure in the French capital very little had changed and I gazed in wonder at the glistening marble dome of the Sacre Coeur. Inside the same smell of candles mingled with a thousand tourists and devotees. The priest, I’m sure the same one, intoned a passage from an aged Bible. A nun, her arms spread not in supplication but in order to conduct the choir, wore the black and white vestments of her vocation, her hair chastely hidden. The voices were still sweet as they soared in harmony to the arched domes high above. Christ continued to gaze at his followers from the ornate stain-glass windows.

A sense of continuity, of history that is all pervasive in European churches is on one hand comforting, on the other, almost anachronistic. Nothing changes. Possibly a reflection of my somewhat conflicted feelings about organised religion.

We left the murmuring worshippers to see Paris stretched below. The grey louring sky punctuated by famous landmarks – the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Bourse cloaked in tenting, and curling through the city like a sleek satin ribbon, the Seine. Lights began to wink through the misty evening and an image came to mind of a thousand gas lighters striding the streets before electrification in 1878.

Coming down from on high, tawdry shop fronts selling pink rubber dildos shaped like the aforementioned tower reminded me we were nearing Place Pigalle, and the famous sails of the  Moulin Rouge and ooh la la Can Can dancers in frilly knickers. I clutched my handbag closer and strode along, daring interference. Paris’s red-light district is not the place to show uncertainty. Entreaties to enter one sleazy, curtained establishment after another made me hanker for the windows of the Wallen, the rosse buurt of Amsterdam where girls and women display their wares from the windows – the older the prostitute the higher up the building she goes. Somehow the Dutch equivalent seems less vulgar.

My companion for the weekend was my sister Val, and heading in the vague direction of our gracious host’s flat on rue d’Hauteville we realised we needed sustenance. Perhaps an aperitif and hors d’oeuvre. We were in Paris after all.

The reason for the trip – as if one needs a reason to visit Paris – was research. Though the manuscript for my next historical novel, Transfer, is  firmly in the hands of OC Publishing, Val suggested that rather than research, the visit would be confirmation of various places mentioned. To that end, dinner was to be at Le Bouillon Chartier – founded in 1896, it plays a minor part in the book. Very little seemed to have changed from information gleaned from various websites – certainly not the decor, nor the uniform of its bustling but pleasant waiters. The food was unremarkable but the ambiance unbeatable, and yes, the bill was totted up on white paper tablecloth. No calculators allowed.

The next morning, flaky crumbs of fresh croissants clinging to our lips, we made our way across Pont Neuf where the Seine shimmered in the cold brilliant sunshine. Notre Dame on the Ile de la Cité tempted us but we continued along Boulevard Saint-Germain to our destination, Musée de Cluny. We were not disappointed. The “Lady and the Unicorn” woolen and silk tapestries were magnificent – works of art from Flanders in the Middle Ages depicting the five senses. The sixth tapestry with the words “À mon seul désir” has a more obscure meaning, possibly representing love and understanding.

Museums are thirst inducing so we found respite and refreshments at that most famous of writer’s establishments, Les Deux Magots, where I could imagine Hemingway and Baldwin sipping cognac as they solved the problems of the world, or at least the comma. Perhaps Simone de Beauvoir or Jean Paul Sartre chatted with them. Now it is patronised mainly by tourists, and people like me hoping some of their genius might still linger and alight on my shoulders.

Another ooh la la moment came after recrossing the Seine via the footbridge, Pont des Arts, when the ground rumbled from the throaty revving of about sixty motorbikes waiting at traffic lights. All the riders wore yellow safety vests and we learned they were part of an organized demonstration against rising fuel prices and the Macron administration. The bikes roared past us, then again as we walked north but apart from shouts and roaring engines there was little of concern.

The tear gas and police cordons of the following weekend did not thankfully impinge on our Paris sojourn, and I left the City of Light comforted that whilst German and Allied tanks might have rolled along the elegant boulevards, and discontented citizens might harangue politicians, it is still a city of culture and excitement, imbued with that wonderful air of  je ne sais quoi!

And I won’t be waiting so long time for my next visit to Paris!