Cynthia Hélène Cynthia Brooke, the central female character in Mad Hatter is based on my own mother, also named Cynthia. She was a Francophile who had been sent to Paris to live with a family and learn French. This period was, I believe, the heyday of her life; ironic...
The most readily understood wartime internment for North Americans is of the Japanese during WW2. There are films and books on the topic – Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson (both book and film), Obasan, a novel by Joy Kogawa. That period of internment is...
In 1993 a film based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel – The Remains of the Day – was released, and soon after I saw the film for the first time. That was when I knew very little about my father or his involvement in the British Union of Fascists; and almost...
I grew up without a father. I have a photo of a tall handsome man holding me on his shoulder – I must have been one and a half, perhaps two? – but I have no memories of him. And when I was eleven he committed suicide. It meant little to me at the time. Only later, as...
GETTING THE WAR STRAIGHT I was born at the tail-end of World War Two, the one that came after The War to End All Wars. 1944/5 were the very worst years in terms of death and atrocities – the March 1944 invasion of Hungary with mass deportation of Hungarian Jews to...
