LAST WRITE OF THE PROMS

Of course I blame Nigel Kennedy.

We’d been invited to a friend’s house for supper and a joint watching of the Last Night of the Proms which, apart from the wonderful Joyce DiDonato and Marin Alsop, also starred Nigel Kennedy.  At least he is British, the other two being and sounding - as Simon Schama was to observe - impeccably American.  Pomp and Circumstance internationalised at last.  But I miss the sea shanties.  Perhaps they couldn't be internationalised.

Still, Nigel Kennedy made me think of three very pretty female violinists who play ‘Kalinka’ on YouTube.  Well I guess they play it in lots of other surroundings as well but I always used to listen to them when I was writing my novel  ‘Boraya’ to put me in a suitably Russian mood and when I got home after the Proms I played the video again.

Suddenly I was transported back to Borayaland - to the Casa Malinka dacha:  an eerie feeling - half way between a dream and a memory.  I wandered through the rooms of the dacha, sensing the atmosphere as though in an empty house, being reminded of the events and the people and the conversations that I had placed there.   I had written these but now I felt that I had merely been a fly on the wall and that the events I had imagined had really taken place and I had seen them.  Strange and bewildering this confusion of memory and imagination.

Casa Malinka wasn’t based on any house I had ever seen being a Catalan house on the Gulf of Finland, with an onion dome on the roof; large windows, big heavy doors and a long garden, falling gently away from the house.  It was as though I had lived there once - which I suppose for the nine months I that was writing the novel - I had been.

'Boraya'  still has no takers, however.  The manuscript - or should that now be ‘e-script?’ - lies on a London agent’s slush pile awaiting the end of the month when the sands of hope will run out.  It is looking as though I shall have to publish it myself.  We’ll see.  It was a learning experience, though still a good read and a page turner.  Maybe a little unsubtle, but little in Russian life is subtle.  Some people have read it avidly, others it seems to have left cold.  I suppose as my first (possibly my only, who knows?) novel it has a special place in my heart.

All of which makes me yearn to get on with writing my second one - 'Henric's Mill' - which will be set in France and which spans the life of a refugee from the 1920’s Russian Civil war who escapes from Russia with his sister’s papers - something that leads to all sorts of complications.  The story set first in Paris and then in the Cantal runs through the Second World War and up to the present (more or less) when Felix, the protagonist and now in his late eighties becomes a refugee from French Justice and escapes back to Russia.  Felix's character is slowly forming in my head and beginning to tell me the hoops through which he wants me to jump.

But instead of being able to get on with composing such entertaining nonsense I am hard at work trying to publish all the Neolithic research I have done over the years in order at least to  have a proof copy of a small book when I have to give a talk to a student archeology society in November.  The text is more or less written but it is taking ages to transform it into the typeset and illustrated pdf file required by the publishers.  In this case it is the pictures rather than the characters that seem to have minds of their own.

Yet I did do something this week for the first time (or at least the first time that I can remember, which isn't the same thing) and that was to pick up my neighbour’s six year old from school.  The neighbour had had to go to London and my task was to take her daughter home and give her to the babysitter who would be arriving - or so I was told.

I stood in the rain with huddled groups of other parents awaiting the magic hour at which the school portals would open and the children emerge.  Except they didn’t.  They come out one at a time and these days each has to ‘spot’ a parent or parent substitute before being released.  Luckily Rose knows me quite well, but she was one of the last to come out and the rain was heavy.  I wondered if I had come to the right door.  But eventually there she was and so we were able to run home while she told me a long and involved story she had written that day about a white rabbit called Milly who had a brother and a sister (also white rabbits) and a Mother rabbit, called Lily (or maybe Lilly), who was Ginger.  I didn’t catch half of it and all the rabbits ended up in a tree at one point from which they descended by simply leaping to the ground.

I protested.  "Rabbits don't climb trees," I said unhelpfully.

“That’s the thing about stories,” said Rose a little crossly.  I can make my characters do absolutely anything I want.

Bright confident morning! Clearly the rabbits haven't started yet to argue with their author.