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Tales from the Tip of an Era

With the Industrial Revolution and  the birth of a middle-class, some seized  opportunities while others struggled for survival.

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I write true stories of everyday heroes who faced extraordinary circumstances with the audacity that defined the Victorian and Edwardian era.  Of adventurers, larger-than-life men and women, and ordinary people finding their way in a world that was tipping into the technologically-driven modern era. Of lives shaped by events and the mysterious forces of chance more powerful than us all.  

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Like us they tried to overcome their weaknesses, wrestled with their personal demons and played their cards as best they could.

Glasgow Saturday Night   

John Atkinson Grimshaw  (1836–1893)

No Man's Land

London, 1914.  John Reed leaves a promising career at Lloyd’s to enlist in the Black Watch. The first months are almost carefree. At one of Lord Kitchener’s training camps on the Sussex Downs, eager young men learn to be soldiers. They play at war, take pride in their new uniforms and forge lasting friendships. John trains as a Lewis gunner and befriends Garnet Dobbs, a Canadian bandsman from Belleville, Ontario, who enlisted as a musician and ends up a stretcher-bearer.

From the vast hospital camp at Étaples to the Somme and the mud of Flanders, John’s gun team struggles to hold on to its sanity, sustained by camaraderie, humour and letters from home. In Britain and Canada, women take men’s places in the workforce and send letters and parcels to the Front.

For those at the Front and those left behind, the war becomes a test of endurance.

The Station Master's Daughter
(three novellas)

1. Fields of Glory 

Veigy-Foncenex, France, 1914. Mobilization turns village life upside down. The able-bodied men and horses leave for the Front, and women, children and old men are left to work the farms. Jean-Marie and Léon Pertuiset join the Chasseurs Alpins, France’s elite mountain troops as stretcher bearers, and face brutal conditions in the Vosges.

At home, old rivalries resurface. Anti-clerical feeling divides the village and draws its progressive priest into the conflict.

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2. The Station Master’s Dauighter

Weil am Rhein, Germany, 1925.  A rebellious young woman, the stationmaster’s daughter, discovers the heady culture of Munich, only to disgrace herself and be sent home to her dull border town.

​Against her father’s wishes, she answers an advertisement for a lady’s companion in a French village, ostensibly to improve her French. There she falls in love with one of the village’s most eligible bachelors. Their romance scandalizes the village, but the couple refuse to be bound by old grievances. The war is over, they insist. The old world has had its day, and a new age has begun.

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3. The Fräulein

Veigy, France, 1927.  The Great War may be over, but its scars and prejudices remain. Across the border in Germany, the Weimar Republic is under mounting pressure as National Socialism gains ground. Adolf Hitler emerges as a charismatic leader, promising national renewal, prosperity and a brighter European future under German leadership. An energetic propaganda campaign promotes these ambitions and seeks closer relations with Britain and France. Beneath the promises, however, antisemitism is growing, with Jews increasingly blamed for Germany's economic troubles and social upheaval.

A German bride sees the promise of a resurgent Germany as a glimmer of hope. Yet in Veigy, she struggles to find her place in the rigid social fabric of village life. The new age she longs for seems tantalisingly close, yet remains elusive.

Vichy
(three novellas)

1. The Italians

Veigy, 1940. France has fallen, and the small border village of Veigy comes under Italian occupation. Although the rhythms of rural life are disrupted by oppressive rules and requisitions of the Vichy puppet regime, the Italian authorities prove relatively lenient. Antisemitic measures and restrictions on cross-border trade are enforced unevenly, allowing a precarious underground economy to flourish. As German propaganda intensifies and antisemitism takes hold in France, a growing number of Jewish refugees begin making their way through the countryside towards the Swiss border. An underground network emerges, its members driven by very different motives: some risk everything out of compassion, while others see an opportunity to profit from the desperation of those fleeing persecution. Across the border, contraband becomes a way of life.

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Meanwhile, the Pertuiset family find themselves caught between two worlds. The German-born mother is increasingly isolated in a community where hostility towards Germany runs deep, while her French husband must contend with the growing resentment of his own family and neighbours. Their children struggle to understand the divisions that are closing in around them. But the fall of Mussolini brings this fragile period of relative freedom to an end.

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2. Whispers

Veigy, 1943.  With the collapse of Italian occupation, German forces take control of Veigy. The relative latitude of the Italian period gives way to a regime of surveillance and increasingly brutal enforcement. As the Germans uncover the underground networks operating along the Swiss border, the danger to those helping Jewish refugees intensifies. German propaganda distorts the news and antisemitic rhetoric grows ever more virulent; truth becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from official lies. In this climate of suspicion, interpreters wield a dangerous power. The line between collaboration and resistance grows perilously thin as neighbours are divided by competing loyalties and the struggle to survive.

For the Pertuiset family, the occupation brings a more intimate kind of devastation. The German mother's fragile hold on sanity begins to unravel, and the children become the targets of her mounting distress. Their French father must navigate not only the dangers of occupation but the hostility of his own family and neighbours towards his wife. The children, bewildered by the behaviour of the adults around them, find themselves caught in a world whose rules and loyalties no longer make sense.

As propaganda corrodes faith in the news, authority and even one's own judgement, the question of whom—or what—to believe becomes increasingly fraught.

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3.  Liberation

Veigy, 1945.When the German occupation finally collapses, France erupts in celebration. But freedom brings its own reckoning. In the villages of Haute-Savoie, Resistance fighters and former collaborators settle old scores, while suspicion and revenge threaten to overwhelm justice and a population tries to rewrite its own wartime history. For the people of Veigy, the end of the war does not bring an end to suffering. For some, the hardest battles begin when the fighting stops.

The Man on the Train

Bohemia, Czechoslovakia, 1938, Europe is in turmoil, but a wealthy Czech entrepreneur at the forefront of its booming aviation industry still believes in a future of opportunity and progress. His children learn to fly at an early age, growing up in a world of adventure and abundance. On a long train journey from an aviation conference in Paris, he strikes up a conversation with a charming German passenger who speaks enthusiastically of Germany's resurgence: new industries and expanding trade in a stronger, more prosperous Europe. Surely, he suggests, the old animosities of the Great War can finally be put aside. Their conversation turns to their shared passion for flying, and they talk aircraft for much of the journey.

But as they part on the platform, the stranger draws him aside and quietly delivers a startling warning: there will be war. Get your children out of the country. Only later does he discover that the man was Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy.

As Czechoslovakia is surrendered to Hitler in the name of appeasement, his fourteen-year-old daughter Madla and her older brother Jiří are sent to England for safety. A family friend, an acrobatic flyer and one of the company's test pilots, escapes and joins the RAF in time for the Battle of Britain.

Wartime England is a grim contrast to the life Madla has left behind. Beautiful, charming and a little mischievous, she eventually goes to university, where she shares lodgings with a plain, sensible English girl who could hardly be more different. An unlikely friendship develops, one that will change Madla's life

The Man on the Train

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