Hazel McHaffie

pandemic

Psychological thriller meets family saga

Ever since I decided to write one myself (Killing me Gently) I’ve been fascinated by the structure of, and driving force behind, psychological thrillers. Family sagas tick another of my boxes. Plus I’ve read Louise Jensen before, so The Fall caught my attention when it came out recently. It’s set against the background of the effects of Brexit, the pandemic, and the current economic instability, which makes it feel real and immediate.

Beth and Kate are 40 years old, and identical twins. They both have 15-year-old daughters who have been inseparable … until a secret drives them apart. Now one of them, Caily, is in a coma in hospital following a fall from a bridge. The police think she was pushed – her cousin’s DNA is under her nails.

But everyone in the family is harbouring a secret. Some of them dread Caily recovering consciousness. What will she remember? What did she know that put her in such danger? Will relationships survive if she regains her memory; if she talks?

Someone is leaving gifts for her. How are they getting in? Why bring her bloodied ballet shoes into hospital?

Where has the handsome farmhand Travis gone so suddenly? Why does he reject Caily’s interest so violently?

Who are these men who lurk in the shadows, and drive Range Rovers, and threaten people in their own homes?

The story is cleverly conceived and skillfully unravelled, and I did like the echo in the first line of each chapter of the last line in the preceding one. Other stylistic choices niggled me somewhat, but hey, this author has had considerable success, so she’s allowed some idiosyncrasies. And she certainly kept me guessing as one after another character came under the spotlight with their guilty secrets and mixed motives and reasons to fear Caily recovering her memory and speech. A page-turner and a salutary tale about the impact of deception and lies on relationships.

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Covid drama

Hot on the heels of the drama about the Post Office scandal, comes one about the Covid pandemic. Breathtaking is based on the book by Dr Rachel Clarke which I reviewed during the crisis, and Rachel herself worked with the brilliant Jed Mercurio and Prasanna Puwanarajah (two doctors turned TV writers) to create this series – three powerful episodes. She cried writing it; she cried making it; she cried watching it. Small wonder. The scenes she witnessed, the emotions she experienced in real life, will be forever etched in her memory. I can only dimly imagine the pain of reliving the pandemic this intensely.

For us the programme is raw and unflinching in its portrayal of the horror. Much of it is seen through the eyes of consultant Abbey Henderson, (played by Joanne Froggatt, best known as a maid in Downton Abbey) a young mother of two, who gives her all to patients and staff, all the while knowing her best simply isn’t good enough in these unprecedented circumstances. Because …
..there simply aren’t enough staff to cope with the overwhelming deluge of sick people;
..protective equipment is inadequate and in short supply;
..front line staff are using bin-liners and visors made my schoolchildren;
..care has to be rationed, decisions made about who lives or dies;
..death statistics are astronomical;
..triaging is ineffective;
..colleagues are dying;
..testing kits aren’t available;
..there is no vaccine, no cure;
..relatives are excluded;
..bad news has to be given over the phone;
..government reports and advice don’t match what’s happening at the coalface;
..false reassurances are being issued by the political and medical leaders;
..terrible decisions are being made with dire consequences;
..guidelines and policies, both local and national, simply don’t square with clinical assessment.
On and on it goes, wall-to-wall catastrophe, tragedy, disaster.

The drama certainly brings to life the terrible burden on NHS staff, exhausted and crushed by the horrors they are seeing daily, the terror of the unknown, but it captures too the beautiful moments where human empathy and sensitivity shine through the despair – a doctor playing his violin for a dying patient; rules being bent to allow a young mother to see her two little girls one last time; distraught staff hugging each other on the changing room floor; staff lining up in the corridors in silent tribute to a dead colleague.

It traces the disastrous decisions made by the government, rendered the more vivid and poignant by footage of the actual briefings and the real politicians and advisors we remember all too vividly standing at those podiums, giving false information, obfuscating, trotting out platitudes. Who can ever forget the Barnard Castle scandal? Or the prime minister proudly commending himself for shaking hands with patients and staff indiscriminately, and going without a mask? Or those photos of partying in Downing Street?  Coming as it does after the massive coverage relating to the Covid Inquiry and the exposure of political failures and abuses, it’s hard to watch again the false information and hypocritical assurances about ‘protective rings’ and ‘doing all in our power’ and relaxing lockdown for Christmas. Harder still now we know those making the rules were flouting them brazenly themselves, taking the public for fools.

Emotional viewing but spectacularly effective filming. And something of Rachel Clarke’s own humanity and empathy is embedded in it. This drama must surely win prizes and be a catalyst for change. The official Inquiry is supposed to help us learn lessons for future pandemics, but at times it has degenerated into farce. Perhaps bringing the reality into the lives and living rooms of the public through a TV programme will be a more effective instrument in minimising the mistakes and protecting people in the future. We can only hope so.

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How to Kill Your Family

Ahah, if you read my post last week, I guess you’ll have been wondering when this topic might appear – How to Kill Your Family. This debut novel by Bella Mackie was written during the pandemic and published last year, quickly becoming a Sunday Times bestseller. Given the reaction of the lovely waitress at Shugborough Manor, I felt somewhat compelled to get on and read the book, to assure her/readers that it was indeed part of my writerly research, not signifying any evil intent on my part!

It’s a tale that takes us inside the mind of an unusual psychopath, one who is possessed and intoxicated by her need/desire to wipe out a complete family. The young killer in this case believes that there’s a certain art to a good murder. She’s not into bloodshed and savage violence; rather she’s fascinated by the motives and habits of her potential victims, and wants their own extravagant lifestyles to be the cause of their undoing. To that end her research is meticulous. She studies the minutiae of the lives and appetites of each of her victims to find a way of killing that happens while they are going about their ordinary everyday activities doing something perfectly normal for them. And, of course, that way credibility is given to a verdict of ‘accidental death’.

Grace Barnard was born of a short unbalanced relationship between an impecunious but effortlessly-beautiful French girl, Marie, and a wealthy entitled already-married man, Simon Artemis, 22 years her senior, one of the richest men in the world, who rejected Marie and her baby both at the pregnancy stage and when Marie appealed to him just before her own untimely premature death.

From the age of 13 Grace has planned a way to avenge her mother: she would rid the world of this morally rotten family, the embodiment of toxic capitalism, a vacuum of morality, a totem of greed. And she had absolutely no qualms about doing so. After all, it wouldn’t be taking anything decent away, would it? Indeed it would be for the public good.

By the time we meet her, she has calmly and methodically killed six members of the Artemis family and then carried on with the rest of her life without a single regret. But having evaded justice for these murders, she is now in Limehouse prison for a crime she did not commit – the death of her foster-brother’s fiancee. To relieve the relentless boredom inside while she awaits her expensive lawyer arranging to get her off her life sentence, she decides to secretly write an accurate account of her life and actions.  Re-living the murders, observing her own cleverness, and remembering how she contrived to right a great wrong, helps, though she’s only too conscious that her scribblings are nowhere near the level of Oscar Wilde‘s musings from his prison cell.

Killing her biological grandparents seemed like the least problematic task.
‘… it didn’t matter as much. Old people who do nothing but drain their pensions and stultify in their favourite armchairs isn’t a brilliant advertisement for humanity.’ They’ll only ‘become useless bed blockers who get more and more mean-spirited until they are nothing more than bigoted beasts of burden living in the room you wanted to make a study … old and disposable, and they live staggeringly useless lives.’
Oh, and from the outset her own grandparents wanted nothing to do with their illegitimate granddaughter, Grace, so they don’t deserve to go on living. A ‘natural’, ‘accidental’ death in a car crash attracts no unwarranted attention.

Her cousin Andrew poses a bigger problem. She hasn’t bargained for him being likeable. But, unknown to her, he had already turned his back on wealth and privilege, and now spends his days trying to save the world and mankind through conservation and natural remedies, currently centring on amphibians and hallucinogens. He has put his toxic family out of his life and Grace finds it far harder to carry out her plan with a truly blithe spirit. Finding a way to kill him without arousing suspicion takes a long time in the planning, but his end is suitably gentle and amongst his beloved frogs.

Uncle Lee is a chancer steeped in privilege and greed … a heartless sociopath with nothing at all to recommend him to Grace. It’s a pleasure to carry out her plan with him. His seedy proclivities become his undoing and she watches him die with great satisfaction. But his wife Lara is a different kettle of fish and Grace simply can’t bring herself to harm someone so guileless and decent and wronged.

Her father’s wife Janine, however, is a mean, selfish, indulged woman who spends her whole days doing precisely as she wishes and bullying those whom she considers beneath her. Grace is increasingly drawn to the idea of letting her obscenely luxurious home in Monaco turn on her, and she employs the skill of a needy 17-year-old computer nerd and Janine’s put-upon maid to enable her plan. It’s a calculated risk involving others but she builds in protection for herself to minimise the possibility of a backlash. And again the murder passes as a tragic accident.

Totally spoilt and pampered Bryony, Simon’s 27-year-old legitimate daughter, is the one whose death is most likely (if any) to affect Simon, so Grace leaves her till the penultimate kill. Only when he has suffered this acute loss will she reveal herself and her final intention to him.  Bryony has one specific natural weakness which Grace decides to exploit: she is allergic to peaches. The premature death of a young heiress attracts media attention but no suspicion and Grace finally gets a glimpse into the pain she is inflicting on her father.

Only one target left: Daddy dearest himself, the principal victim from the outset. But she hasn’t bargained on him being paranoid for his own safety after losing so many relatives, rendering him virtually unreachable. And it’s an enormous anticlimax when Simon disappears at sea piloting his speedboat while drunk during a visit to his villa in St Tropez. Frustrated and bewildered, Grace weeps for days. Now he would never get to know what she had done and why – the whole point of the plan.

Explanation comes in an unexpected email which she receives the day she is released from prison; an email that will vanish once it’s read. Someone else had a vested interest in the Artemis family; someone else shared a remarkably similar status; someone else was born to a young silly woman dazzled by a larger-than-life Simon Artemis, and then cast aside when he became bored with her; someone else feels entitled to the Artemis’ wealth; someone else was involved in the end of a dynasty. It comes as a complete shock. Especially when that someone knows so much about Grace and her actions. When that someone has effectively scuppered her entire operation.

Journalist and columnist Bella Mackie has created a brilliant plot, based on clever insights into the mind of an emotionally detached but somewhat naive psychopath, and an understanding of human psychology and behaviour. The book is at once gripping, compulsive and chillingly dark. It’s not a comfortable feeling getting inside the head of someone who can kill without scruple, but Mackie manages to keep a lightness of touch and humour by tailoring the deaths – not the usual messy slaughtering, but clean, almost natural ends to pampered lives; and by fleshing out the impact of social injustices and inequalities that fuel Grace’s slow-burning anger, using caustic commentary to give us a degree of sympathy with her single-minded crusade to clean up the world.

The book served as a small diversion from some serious study into much more edifying subjects the waitress at Shugborough would be pleased to know – about virtue and ethics and integrity in real life. The other end of the spectrum from murder.

Interestingly this week the BBC aired a four part programme called The Sixth Commandment based on the true story of a young man who befriended lonely elderly people and conned them out of their money and self respect. He too could take life without scruple. Sobering reality.

 

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The world of the writer

All authors feel like giving up, sometimes. In the last year, though, I have heard more authors than usual saying they are going to do it. Or, if not that, then saying that they want to work but can’t. For some, strain and anxiety have smothered the spark, not least the strain of seeing income – from festivals, school visits and theatrical work, say – disappear. … survival conditions are not often conducive to creativity.
For others, the issue is, or has been, isolation and lack of stimulation …
(Think libraries and archives shut … conversation difficult … travel almost impossible.)
I suspect though that what has most sapped authors’ creativity has been a lurking sense of triviality and irrelevance … It can be hard to believe that what you are doing matters when the world, a country or your family is in a life-endangering crisis.

So said James Connachie, Editor of the Society of Authors’ journal, The Author, writing in Summer 2021. And comments on the effect of the pandemic have bobbed up repeatedly throughout the last year. It has had a major effect on writers, including me. Nonetheless, there is far more to feel positive about in our lives and reach, and that too has been a recurrent theme in the journal.

None of us, however modest our sales, should forget how fortunate we are, to possess a power of self-expression that is denied to all but a minute fraction of the human race. (Max Hastings, Summer 2021)

We all have the power in our actions to move the dial towards the society we would wish to build. Hope lives and dies in the hands of individuals and the choices we make, and it requires all of us to venture beyond our silos of certainty. (Sarfraz Manzoor, Autumn 2021)

Isn’t that the job of writers and artists after all? To explore, reimagine and re-present the world in all its strangeness and banality? (Dan Richards, Winter 2021)

It is reading that refuels and restores us. You can’t pour out words without restocking the tanks. Sentences in, sentences (different ones, hopefully better, usually not) out. The cycle can’t be broken. (Lucy Mangan, Spring 2022)

The world of the career writer is a rarefied one, crazy, discombobulating at times, but I am enormously grateful for the beautifully crafted prose which consummate masters of our trade contribute to our very own magazine. Thank you for another year of excellent thought-provoking articles and all the encouragement to persevere.

 

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The Covid pandemic – fact and fiction

It’s some years since I read a Jodi Picoult book, but this one, Wish You were Here, seemed to challenge me to overcome my personal reservations about fictionalising the horrors of Covid-19 – all that fear and death and loss and trauma. So I swallowed hard and bought it, and I read it immediately before I could chicken out. OK, yes, I have hangups here which might prejudice my review; I declare them openly.

The story is set at the beginning of the pandemic and features a couple separated by it. Diana, an art specialist, is marooned on an island in the Galápagos that has closed down almost completely against the virus, while her doctor boyfriend, Finn, is marooned in a hospital in New York City as Covid rushes through and over them like a tsunami.

Virtually cut off from her former life, Diana finds herself examining everything that has brought her to this point, and wondering just what the future holds.

… you don’t often get to pause and reflect on [your life]. It’s just really hard to sit in the moment, and not worry if pause is going to turn into stop.

In a strange way, being stripped of everything – my job, my significant other, even my clothing and my language – has left only the essential pert of me, and it feels more real than everything I have tried to be for years. It’s almost as if I had to stop running in order to see myself clearly, and what I see is a person who’s been driving towards a goal for so long she can’t remember why she set it in the first place.

Thus far, so Picoult! She’s famous for her psychological takes after all.

Half way through I’m getting bored. It all feels too contrived. The medical updates Finn sends to Diana smack of an author wanting to cram the facts she’s learned during her research into her story somewhere. We’ve all had our fill of what Covid did in real life and that so recently; we know the facts. And surely no man worth his salt would bore his girlfriend with so much inappropriate information in an email when she’s on holiday … would he? So I was beginning to consider abandoning the book … when, uh-oh, page 183, and Picoult changes the narrative in one fell swoop.

I won’t spoil the story-line for others, but suffice it to say the rest of the book gave me a second wind because I was mentally revising the impressions of the preceding half. But a big bit of me was thinking, Did she just commit the cardinal sin on a par with ‘It was all a dream’? Even if not, it’s the impact Covid has had on our lives that dominates. However, Picoult is adopting a fairly unusual angle – the psychological legacy, and this might well be appealing to readers coming from a different background from mine.

So, what did I conclude? Well, I was interested to read she too was reluctant to write during her time of quarantine and isolation, and I have to admire her ability and determination in rising above that resistance. But I’m afraid my personal reservations about making this real-life horror into a made-up story so close to the lived experience prevented me from really entering into it. The actual emotional and mental trauma has been too great. Sorry, Jodi, this one wasn’t for me.

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Exemplary service

We all know about the devastating effect of the pandemic on NHS waiting lists, and doctors’ appointments, and cancer diagnoses and treatment. We’ve all been aware of the changed rules of engagement for going into hospitals; some of us even fell foul of the policies that kept us from visiting our loved ones in hospitals and homes, denied us opportunities to say those last goodbyes.

So I’ve been staggered by the ongoing care I’ve received as an outpatient myself. Four and a half years ago I was diagnosed with cancer and had two surgeries to treat it. Because it was one of the more virulent and life-threatening forms of malignancy, I was told I would be monitored closely for five years, and given contact details for specialists whom I could ring if I was worried about anything between appointments. Initially I was seen every three months, and then gradually the time periods extended. Then the pandemic struck and so many routine appointments were cancelled. But mine were continued. When complete lockdown was in place I was given a consultation by phone, but once restrictions lifted sufficiently, the team felt I should be seen in person, and real appointments resumed. Last week I had my penultimate consultation.

To be honest I should have been perfectly satisfied if they’d said, just contact us if you’re worried. Indeed, I’ve felt guilty about taking up a valuable slot in a beleaguered health service, and told them so. But they’ve been adamant; each check is important, my welfare is important. I am both impressed and grateful. They have done all the worrying for me.

So it was perhaps serendipitous that, this latest visit, I took with me to the clinic waiting room a slim volume about a woman who worries about everything! It’s The Purveyor of Enchantment by Marika Cobbold – an undemanding read, requiring little concentration.

Clementine Hope, thirty-six, large and newly divorced, is a piano teacher and pathological worrier. She inherits a house, a stack of unfinished fairy tales, and an inferiority complex from her Aunt Elvira. Her half-sister Ophelia is younger, smaller, calmer and saner, and she despairs of Clementine’s fears and negativity.

When Clementine, after a failed relationship, determines to take herself in hand, she goes overboard in the risks she takes. Why does she have to be so extreme? a friend asks. Her reply: ‘I think you have to be to arrive in the middle. It’s a question of adjustment. I’ve been living a life confined by petty fears. Now I’m trying to be magnificently bold in order to finally arrive somewhere in the region of normal and sensible.’ Magnificently bold or magnificently stupid it may be, but her homespun version of aversion therapy does the trick: her fears recede and she reaches for a different future where she is in control … in spite of Ophelia.

Needless to say, I didn’t read the whole book waiting for my appointment!  Conscious of the importance of limited time and space in the socially distanced chairs, appointments are now super-efficient. Hats off to an excellent department and its team of committed staff. And the book? Well, it’s on its way to the charity shop. Not one for my shelves, I’m afraid.

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A Matter of Life and Death

It’s curious how, right now, so many books are taking me back to my own recent experience in hospital fighting for my sister’s best interests to be respected. One such is  A Matter of Life and Death, written by a palliative care nurse, Kelly Critcher, who elected to take a turn working  in a High Dependency Unit during the Covid-19 pandemic. But it’s been a useful exercise. Listening to  the perspective of the staff dealing with the fallout, gives a more rounded picture, which helps to keep our own personal frustrations in proportion.

Nursing is in Kelly Critcher’s blood; both her mother and grandmother were nurses, but she initially took a different route, first gaining a degree in Business Management, and then going into office life. However, she found no fulfilment in any of the avenues she tried – they were just a job to be done. Her heart lay elsewhere.

From the outset, nursing suited her perfectly, and she loved the energy and drive of a busy general hospital in Greater London, Northwick Park. However, increasingly she found herself drawn to a less high-powered speciality, one that provided holistic care with the patient’s needs centre-stage: palliative care, an area where she could make a real difference to the lived experience of dying.
… to look death in the eye – to save a patient while the fight can still be won, and confront life’s end with grace and kindness when it can’t.

Her book is divided into two parts, the first of which deals with her professional life up to early 2020, and includes so many incidences that resonate with me. On one level it’s confirming; on another it’s disturbing. I so want to defend those patients whose care fell below the standard they had a right to expect, and I commend this brave nurse who has shined a light on the deficiencies, and championed the cause of the terminally ill. There should be no room for entrenched attitudes, arrogant consultants, dictatorial regimes, old-school ways, that ride rough shod over gentle dignified management.
… there are no second chances when someone is dying. No going back to do it differently next time …

When Covid-19 hit the hospitals, the London Borough of Brent, which has some of the most deprived and diverse communities in the UK, became the epicentre of the pandemic. Northwick Park had the worst death rate of any local authority in England and Wales, and was the first hospital to declare a critical incident, when they ran out of bed space and were about to be overwhelmed. Stringent restrictions had to be implemented, including banning visitors. These measures were particularly hard for staff like Kelly, trained in enabling patients and their families to experience good deaths.
All nurses see the value of a friendly visit to a patient, and in palliative care we recognise family involvement and support as integral to what we do. Covid robbed patients of this basic right ...

It’s hard, knowing what we now know, to be reminded vividly about the failures that characterised the early days of the crisis, when the priority was to clear hospital beds to make way for the tidal wave of patients suffering from this new killer coronavirus about which so little was known. Protection was minimal; risks high.

As we know, staff at the coalface were much more aware of what was unravelling than the Government appeared to be. How vulnerable and badly protected they were. How much they suffered having to implement draconian measures, denying families access to their loved ones, even to say a final goodbye.
People were dying alone, and to us that was an abomination.

This book is no literary masterpiece, and in some places the detail is rather too gruesome for a lay readership (IMO), but it does give some useful insights into life on the NHS frontline. It’s sobering to read …
For years we’ve battled against underfunding, working in old, decrepit hospitals with constant bed and equipment shortages. We have faced complaints from patients, families, managers, politicians, the press and the public on a daily basis. Yet, we still pull ourselves out of bed each day and go to work, knowing that at least some of what we are doing was helping to save lives. Then, in those first few weeks (of the pandemic) that seemed like an eternity, we were national heroes, every one of us.
Were we really so ungrateful?

But alongside the negative experiences, it’s heart-warming to be reminded of the courage and kindness and self-sacrifice the crisis brought out in people. I salute them all. And I thank all those NHS staff who have gone to print and shared their side of the story. Time to move on, methinks!

 

 

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Peace

Christmas blessings to you all and sincere thanks for visiting my blog

It would be all too easy to simply write ‘Happy Christmas, everyone!’ but I know that sadly this will not be a joyous time for many people. The wretched pandemic continues; lives have been wrecked by tragedy and injustice; mental health has suffered; and so it goes on. Shaky smiles have covered many a breakingheart. So instead, whatever your circumstances, let me wish you peace …

If you are currently facing devastating loss or grief,
may you be given the strength and courage to go on.

If you are caught in a spiral of stress and anxiety,
may you find a way through which guides you to a safer place.

If life is currently good and you have all you need,
may these blessings continue, valued and treasured.

If you are fortunate enough to enjoy a super-abundance of health and wealth,
may you have the wisdom, compassion and generosity to share wisely.

If you are in a position of power,
may you seek the humility and insight
to use it to influence others and effect change for the greater good.

‘Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me.’

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Life after Life

A bonus of lockdown was acquiring ‘new’ books from those donated to our outdoor bookshelf. One such was Life after Life by Kate Atkinson, about which I’d seen and read excellent reports. (I’m horrified to discover it’s eight years since it came out, and I’m only now getting round to reading it! Too many books, not enough hours in the day.) But somehow, living in this parallel universe of pandemic for the last eighteen months has made Atkinson’s premise – What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right? – even more pertinent; so perhaps after all it’s a good time to read it.

The hook on the back cover is tantalising:
During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath.
During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale.
What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact an infinite number of chances to live your life?

An ingenious premise upon which to build a novel, huh? And it challenges us to think, What would I do differently, given the opportunity? Would I even want to change things?

Add to that the time period of the story – 1910-1967 – including two great wars, and the implications of a second chance assume even more momentous proportions.
What if a pretty English girl had shot Adolf Hitler in November 1930?
What if a pretty British girl was actually living in Germany when war was declared?
The historic detail relating to big events gives a solid skeleton to this story, but inevitably some factual accuracy is forfeited in the name of literature, as the author herself acknowledges: To find the truth as the heart of a book, a certain amount of reality falls by the way.

Ursula Todd, born in 1910, is a strange child with odd ‘powers’. Was it reincarnation, or clairvoyance, or deja vu, or living in a parallel universe, sixth sense, or what? Certainly her mother thinks she needs ‘fixing’. A Harley Street psychiatrist does his best when she’s 10, but as she grows up, and bad things happen to her, Ursula persists in wondering if death is the answer; she can then have another stab at life and hopefully a happier ending.

We follow her different lives through her rural upbringing with an indulgent father and a superior mother, adult life in London, during the Blitz, and in post-war Berlin. She goes from knowing child, to rape victim, abused wife, assassin, mistress, rescue warden. Back and forth. At times she doesn’t even recognise herself.

It was, I must admit somewhat discombobulating to live through a traumatic experience of the death of a child or young person, only to have them return later in the book very much alive because an alternative version of their lives is being narrated. Short of cataloguing each iteration, I couldn’t hold them all in my head, so went for simply enjoying the moment.

Something of the challenge underpinning this story is captured in these few lines of dialogue about half way through the book:
‘Don’t you wonder sometimes,’  Ursula said. ‘If one small thing had been changed, in the past, I mean. If Hitler had died at birth, or if someone had kidnapped him as a baby and brought him up in – I don’t know, say, a Quaker household – surely things would be different.’
   ‘Do you think Quakers would kidnap a baby?’ Ralph asked mildly.
   ‘Well, if they knew what was going to happen they might.’
   ‘But nobody knows what’s going to happen. And anyway he might have turned out just the same, Quakers or no Quakers. You might have to kill him instead of kidnapping him. Could you do that? Could you kill a baby? With a gun? Or what if you had no gun, how about with your bare hands? In cold blood?’

For me this book came into its own in the section A Long Hard War, where Ursula is a warden dealing with the aftermath of the bombings in London. It poignantly captures the fragility of life, the human tragedy on both sides, the courage and stamina people can find within them, and the importance of small things.

When asked what the book is about, Atkinson says, It’s about being English. That’s not what I took from it. For me it’s about something much more complex; an unravelling of our multi-layered selves, who we are in our imaginations as well as in different circumstances. And how our destiny can be determined by an accident of birth, or a chance conversation, or a seemingly casual encounter or decision. I’m still mulling over all that … and isn’t that one measure of a successful story?

 

 

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Caring in a time of Covid

Yes, I know, I know … I went to sessions on this topic at the Hay Festival, and here I am again, attending more of the same at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Sad soul. But for me it was well worth the element of repetition to hear the important messages spelled out so clearly by those who really know. We do have to learn from the horrors, and now is the time to do so. Just this week our First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has announced concrete plans to begin a judge-led inquiry into how things were managed in Scotland, by the end of this year. Sometimes, though, in the face of relentless coverage of the statistics and long term consequences, it can be hard to see beyond the negativity.

The line up of panellists included Dr Rachel Clarke (palliative care specialist and ex-journalist) and Kate Mosse (novelist and unofficial carer of three elderly relatives) again, but joining them was Dr Gavin Francis (Scottish surgeon and GP). The two doctors have both been working actively on the frontline throughout the last eighteen months, and deserved the spontaneous applause from the live audience. But they were quick to identify the reality: caring is a privilege.

Nevertheless, the deficiencies in the response to the impending crisis, and the slowness of the powers-that-be to mobilise appropriate measures to deal with it, did stir their anger. Indeed it was this pent up frustration that led to the books they wrote.

Much of what they said was known to me, but still shocked. And I was horrified to learn that, not only has the number of unpaid carers escalated colossally during the pandemic, largely because almost all official care stopped, but that they were left largely unsupported. As were young people with special needs, and those with dementia. What kind of a price have vulnerable people paid for this failure? The toll on mental health especially has been devastating, as we know.The full consequences will only emerge gradually.

On the other hand, it was heart-warming to hear that frontline workers had themselves been buoyed up by witnessing the best of human nature too. And as Kate Mosse said, it’s what we all want: a society that looks after each other, that cares, that pulls together. Dare we hope lessons will have been learned for next time? Those who work in the medical world seem sure of one fact: there will be a next time. Sobering thought, huh?

It’s been great to be part of this iconic Festival once again, albeit in a hybrid form this year. A big step up from the cancellation in 2020. And I personally salute all the teams working behind the scenes to make it work – almost without a hiccup this time for me! I guess the person who inadvertently broke a connection will be hiding their mortification in a dark corner somewhere. Come out, come out, whoever you are; all is forgiven.

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