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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 takes leave from his career at Lloyd’s to enlist in the Black Watch, expecting to return to civilian life when the war is over. The early months are almost carefree. At one of Lord Kitchener’s training camps on the Sussex Downs, eager young men learn the business of soldiering. John trains as a Lewis gunner and befriends Garnet Dobbs, a bandsman from Belleville, Ontario.

In Britain and Canada, women take the men’s places in the workforce and send letters and parcels to the Front. From the hospital camp at Étaples to the Somme and the mud of Flanders, those letters help John’s gun team hold on to its sanity.

Garnet puts down his bassoon and is handed a stretcher.

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The Station Master's Daughter
(three novellas)

1. Fields of Glory 

Veigy-Foncenex, France, 1914. Only months before the war, a quarrel between the village’s church-going families and its growing socialist, anti-clerical camp erupts in a battle of the fanfares: the village band against the parish band, with the progressive young priest, l’Abbé Chevrier, drawn into the dispute.

Then mobilization turns village life upside down. Able-bodied men and horses leave for the Front, and women, children and old men are left to work the farms. The Pertuiset brothers, Jean-Marie and Léon, join the Chasseurs Alpins, France’s elite mountain troops. Enlisted as musicians, they are soon carrying stretchers in the mountain fighting of the Vosges.

At home, their father, François, faces the old rivalries alone. With the priest and half the musicians gone, he must keep two farms running and the parish band playing.

2. The Station Master’s Dauighter

Weil am Rhein, Germany, 1925.  

Seven years after the Great War, Germany is reinventing itself under the liberal and often contentious Weimar Republic. Ulda, the station master’s daughter, is swept up in 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 a community still bound by tradition and the grievances of the war, but neither of them intends to let the past decide their future.

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3. The Fräudeleine

Veigy, France, 1927.  The Great War is over, but its prejudices remain. Ulda, now a German bride in a French village, struggles to be accepted. The villagers call her "la Boche" and "la Fraudeleine".

Across the Rhine, Germany is recovering. It has signed the Locarno treaties and joined the League of Nations, and cultural exchanges with France and Britain are flourishing. Ulda looks toward her homeland with growing hope and imagines her children studying there one day.

In Veigy she remains an outsider. The Germany she looks to for her children’s future will one day occupy the country she has made her home.

Vichy
(three novellas)

1. The Italians

Veigy, 1942. 

Two years after France’s defeat, the village is governed from the spa town of Vichy by Marshal Pétain’s collaborationist regime. Ration cards and requisitions reach the farms, while a few kilometres away, across the Swiss border, there is still coffee and tobacco to be had. Contraband becomes a way of life.

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In November 1942, after the Allied landings in North Africa, German and Italian troops occupy the rest of France, and Haute-Savoie falls to the Italians. The new authorities prove relatively lenient. They enforce antisemitic measures and restrictions on cross-border trade unevenly, and the underground economy flourishes. As antisemitism takes hold in France, a growing number of Jewish refugees make their way through the countryside toward the Swiss border. An underground network emerges, its members driven by very different motives: some risk everything out of compassion, while others profit from the desperation of those fleeing persecution.

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Ulda is increasingly isolated in a village where hostility toward Germany runs deep, and her French husband must contend with the resentment of his own family and neighbours. At school, their children learn which families no longer speak to theirs.

Yet as antisemitism takes hold in France, a growing number of Jewish refugees make their way through the countryside toward the Swiss border. An underground network emerges, its members driven by very different motives: some risk everything out of compassion, while others profit from the desperation of those fleeing persecution.

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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. At school, their children learn which families will no longer speak to theirs.

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2. Whispers

Veigy, 1943.  When Italy surrenders in September, German forces take control of Veigy. The relative latitude of the Italian period gives way to surveillance and brutal enforcement. As the Germans uncover the networks smuggling Jewish refugees into Switzerland, the danger to everyone involved grows. Propaganda distorts the news until truth is almost impossible to tell from official lies. In this climate of suspicion, Ulda, the village interpreter, wields a dangerous power, and the line between collaboration and resistance grows perilously thin.

For the Pertuisets, the occupation brings a more intimate kind of devastation. Ulda’s fragile hold on sanity begins to unravel, and her children become the targets of her mounting distress. Her husband must face the dangers of the occupation and the hostility of his own family and neighbours toward his wife. The children, bewildered by the adults around them, no longer know whom to believe.

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3.  Liberation

Veigy, August 1944.  The Resistance drives the Germans out of Haute-Savoie, and France erupts in celebration. But freedom brings its own reckoning. Resistance fighters and former collaborators settle old scores, and suspicion and revenge threaten to overwhelm justice as the country sets about rewriting its own wartime history.

Everyone in Veigy remembers who translated the Germans’ orders.

The Man on the Train

Bohemia, Czechoslovakia, 1938,

Europe is in turmoil, but a wealthy Czech entrepreneur at the forefront of the country’s booming aviation industry still believes in progress. His children learn to fly at an early age.

On the long train journey home from an aviation conference in Paris, he falls into conversation with a charming German passenger, who speaks enthusiastically of Germany’s resurgence and of a stronger, more prosperous Europe. Surely the old animosities of the Great War can be put aside? The two men share a passion for flying and talk aircraft for much of the journey.

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As they part on the platform, the stranger draws him aside and quietly warns him: there will be war. Get your children out of the country. Only later does he learn that the man was Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy.​

After Czechoslovakia is handed to Hitler in the name of appeasement, his fourteen-year-old daughter, Madla, and her older brother, Jiří, are sent to England for safety. Wartime England is a grim contrast to the life Madla has left behind. Pretty and a little mischievous, she eventually goes to university, where she shares lodgings with Dorothy, a sensible English girl who could hardly be more different.

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