You return to that earlier time armed with the present, and no matter how dark that world was, you do not leave it unlit. You take your adult self with you. It is not to be a reliving, but a rewitnessing – Michael Ondaatje, ‘Warlight’ This is the epigraph to my new...
One of the two narrators in Mad Hatter is a child called Katie, who speaks from adulthood, recalling her post-war life. In early childhood she makes a remarkable discovery. I could hear Vera’s voice floating down the corridor as she sang along with Doris Day … ‘With a...
In this blog I share an account of my research trip to Latchmere House, a former MI5 headquarters during WW2 where my father was held and interrogated for 3 weeks in the summer of 1940. This piece is based partly on an excerpt from Mad Hatter, which is a fictionalized...
I’d been sitting on this story all my life, too afraid to tell it because, I had told myself, it’s not important, everyone’s got a better story. But the real reason was, it felt too shameful. Wanting to be heard, yet afraid to tell: this dynamic has governed all my...
My father was a hat manufacturer. Not hands-on. He was management, a director of his grandfather’s hat factory, entitled to sit in an office and shuffle papers, take business trips abroad, that sort of thing. But in fact he was a hands-on man. In the early days of my...
