From the fly on the Wall

Of China opinions, Land conversations, & others

“Many people may think that, now there is Uhuru, now I can see the sun of Freedom shinning, richness will pour down like manna from Heaven. I tell you there will be nothing from Heaven. We must all work hard, with our hands, to save ourselves from poverty, ignorance, and disease.” Jomo Kenyatta, first president of Kenya, from an Independence Day message to the people, as quoted in Sanford Ungar’s Africa, the People and Politics of an Emerging Continent, New York, 1985.

Kayla relocated from Kigali to Nairobi nearly 2 years ago. Her talk is awash with fond memories of Kigali though a much smaller city, where she cycled to work. It’s nothing like Nairobi, she tells Lillian. When Kay went to the Junction the first week after she moved, she felt like she was in London. Well, coming from a smaller city, there was evidence of someone who had missed a bigger city lifestyle, albeit not as much, because she identifies with a country girl.

She is a fond person, mostly because she also reads widely, a habit Lily is yet to adopt. Kay and Lily often pick kitchen discussions busting myths, poking conventional wisdom, and sometimes forming their own “intelligent opinions” on matters around the world. Opinions, just like this piece. At times brilliance can be so annoyingly deceiving. Sometimes, you are just no too sure, and you end up abashed.

Kenya has celebrated Jubilee recently, and Lily feels some impatient thunder emboldening her from within. “You know, the most important gain was independence, there is nothing like freedom. Whilst I agree that being colonized is an unfathomable ill, I also believe that the capability to rule self as a nation is boldly expressed when you give citizenry a reason to be proud of,” she confidently asserts.

We have made considerable gains. Some locust years. Some years of plenty. The economy boom evident, but so has been corruption, multi-million dollar scams. Like in a competition, seeking to outdo the other. To the mwananchi, who works hard to pay the taxes, to feed the kingpins of this country, there is impatience. But for a people who are determined to make each day, the tipping point does not seem so close. In fact there might not get be a point where the taxpayer will demand accountability. The strength we trust is systems, except that their structures are not respected by the ruling class. The rant goes on.

Lily of course doesn’t mean to just whine about all that is not working in the country but feels that we can’t turn a blind eye to all the mess now, can we? Kay thinks the country is right on course, 50 years on and so on. Well, bigger economies took longer to build, and Lily agrees. But 50 years is enough to ensure that the citizenry have access to education (good scores to the free primary education), except that in poverty ridden areas, a child will need a full stomach too, poverty indexes are not too good, and this would fair better if the corruption monster was slayed. And ignorance tops them all, for there is an educated but ignorant mind. This is basing on the indexes that the first president famously mentioned.

 Lily’s brother, Mwek has just returned from China on business the previous evening. He also has been scouting for business in Rwanda. And spurred by the previous intelligent conversation with Kay, goes to catch up with Mwek.

“So how did it go in Rwanda? My bud tells me that that Kigali is amazing! The country is documented as one that has ease in terms of doing business. Additionally, the economy is booming.” Lily asserts without referencing the source of her data.

Mwek agrees and disagrees. There is a misconception you can only discount through experience. He had perched on such thoughts too, but now that he has had experience getting around the bureaucracy of registering a business and it’s not all rosy. It is true you get to register a business within a day, but to operate you need a resident permit to do business, which is a nightmare to obtain. You can give up between the shuttling across different offices, which keep sending you back to where you just came from. “The short of it is that I haven’t commenced,” says Mwek.

Lily is sorry, and quickly adds that there is nothing easier anywhere else anyway. Her biggest challenge is always to bear on the confident gait the brother carries, and the fact that he, being a sociologist turned businessman, advances arguments that make hers look guiless.

And the China trip? Lily asks, hoping Mwek will confirm her opinion that the East is out to ruin Africa. She wears an astonishing look when Mwek says, “No, amazing. Again, l had a chance to bust myths and misconceptions. China is an amazing country. We could learn from them.”

Lily is wary of the look East policy and is for a more cautious approach. Incidentally she doesn’t laud the West either particularly for ills of colonizing the continent and so on. She, in an uncanny way feels the East is on a marauding mission on the continent. She keeps thumping to anyone who cares to give her audience that she doubts the ethos of the Chinese. That one day future generations will curse us, the dead by then, for mortgaging their inheritance. Being market place discussions, there is no empirical evidence to support such aspersions. What she mostly advances as opinions, are carved out of Kay’s opinions.

Mwek does not feel strongly for the West, whom he thinks are causing trouble and funding wars everywhere. “You don’t hear China funding warfare anywhere for economic gain?” he says.

Hold on there, does that make them the angels? All I am saying is we should be careful by getting into agreements and deals that will work for the continent. Not everything on their terms. I hate that we have a bulging unemployed youth but when the East wins these contracts, they ship in their labour. It would make sense if they ship in the experts but the skills we have locally should be utilized. Why is the government not seeing this?

We need funds and investors all right but the fact that we have opportunities for the investors to lunge into, makes Africa an equal party into the discussion and not a desperate case.

But we are own enemies. I have seen it as folly that the governments of Africa despite having an umbrella body AU, don’t seem to do business well together. I am not an economist, but lay knowledge tells me that we could do well if we made and consumed our own products. Develop capacity for our nations to trade with each other. Pray tell, what ails our manufacturing industries? Remembering a term she heard Kay use, “South to South” markets, she tells Mwek that this is Africa’s future!

“The manufacturing industries are so capital intensive, and unless the government buttresses the economy with subsidies, not many can break even.  Also when you say that we should make and consume our own products with equal relish that we consume foreign brands, the quality of our products is wanting. This again ties to capital. It may make economic sense for example, for a fashion enthusiast, to import clothes from China, sell and make profit than to invest in their own fashion label. Quality fabric is expensive so is the cost of doing business. Someone said that after realizing that it would take them 1 hour to fix 3 buttons, they began hunting a button attachment machine, which to their shock cost 150,000. “Patronizing won’t pay bills, you know,” Says Mwek

Lily agrees but she strongly feels that Africa can make and consume own products. See, most African nations have incredible amounts of natural resources, and we keep reading newer discoveries every day. But other than leverage on this, we are busy fighting each other. Then with all these resources, many countries have complementing resources, for example a country that has coal, doesn’t have iron ore, but another has copper etc. but we would rather export all these and import a finished product from other countries;. Can’t we harness our strength, or what is this that keeps us from trading with each other? If gemstones can be mined in Africa, why can’t they also be cut here? I hear in some cases we even sell dirty coffee to processors out there. I guess on of the problems of the African continent is that it never colonized any other continent. No one has seen our might.

But that is why we now have African imperialism. Or is what Uganda is doing in Rwanda or even South Sudan not imperialism?

“I didn’t think it that way,” Lily makes a mental note to read more about imperialism and perhaps cross check with Kay whose opinions she reveres.

Mwek goes on to tell Lily that one thing he liked about China is that no one seems to have a problem with food, or housing or transportation?

Lily is in utter disbelief, as she recalls her entrepreneurship lecturer one day stating that the Chinese live 40 storey skyscrapers, where, even if you were to own a car, there would be no space to park it. It only makes sense to just own a bicycle if you must. “Besides, there are no rich people there. Just a small of the billion population. Do you find that admirable?” she prods.

Lily thinks that either the brother is either out to frustrate her ‘well-formed opinions’ or he does have a better mind. “At least their population lives in dignity. The follies of capitalism have landed us where we are. Murky ditch”, says Mwek.

She hates the mass concentration of wealth to an individual but wonders whether Mwek has not lost it to suggest the socialism way. Why, Tanzania with its socialism seems to fare a little worse than us.

And that’s where socialism provides the answer. In 1930s, in China, the government made a ruling that all land reverted back to the state. And even with a huge population, no one starves.people may not be as wealthy, but they live in dignity. Their transport system is superb. If you own a car, the permit is so damn expensive and so is the license, an approximate Kshs. 200,000. Not many can afford that.

Amazing. On that note, we can borrow that piece. Whilst l will not go for the government taxing such immoral sums to have a license, as it has not provided alternative & comfortable means to mobility, we can glean the lessons to apply to the land sector. I mean who knows how else to kills that mammoth of a monster that sleeps at Ardhi house?

For example, those who own huge tracts of land, which are idle, should pay taxes, not the measly rates, but a huge fine to discourage speculators and have capital channeled in other viable economy growing sectors. Though l think the ridiculous attachment to land is an African thing. It may not just go away overnight. But you should not own all the earth while the rest of the population is homeless. There would be resistance but see where our greed has edged us into? Ridiculous subdivisions that is threatening food security. Like the Chinese we should in every community have people settlement schemes, and the rest of the land is owned by the community, each having relevant shares. In that case, they will take advantage of economies of scale and higher returns will mean everyone is happy. Is that not the essence of life?

They both agree that the extremes of both set ups have their cons, but a better balance can be created where necessary to have a “capital-communism” economy if need be. When she later mentions this to Kayla, she is amazed at her opinion. That even in Britain they have inheritance tax, due to a person’s estate beyond a certain worth when they die. Of course Lily wonders whether the ruling class who own all the earth in this country would welcome even the imagination of such an idea.

She is reaching out for a book she has seen on Kay’s desk. She has noticed besides work files, Kay has also lined up a collection of fat spine books of all fields, and wonders whether this is the reason why she always sounds so intelligent.

Her reverie is interrupted when Kay starts to explain to Mure the genesis of the beef between Ukraine and Russia. She had hitherto convinced herself that Europe is out to have Ukraine join the EU for its own interest, because they would rather have the Caucasians that the Africans. She fears this is naïve but proceeds anyway, stating that perhaps Europe needs cheap labour but Africans carry a more huge burden and would strain their resources. The look on Kay’s face seeks to discount this. Kay counters this argument by stating that Europe would rather Africa to Eastern Europe, as they have the kind of skills that Britain, for example, requires e.g. nursing. The migrants from Eastern Europe on the other hand mostly migrate to Europe to offer labour e.g. picking vegetables. She strongly asserts that Ukraine definitely needs EU more than EU would need them. The US and EU are more avert to a situation of cold war and that’s why they there is an interest.

Lily wonders whether it was a good idea to offer her unsolicited opinion. Her eyes hover over the cover of the book that had caught her eye, “Deterring Democracy” by Noam Chomsky. “My goodness,” she thinks to herself “I need to love to read,” as she wonders whether her mind can crack up such a title.

 

 

Book review – Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulks

Part of a trilogy of Novels set in France, Sebastian Faulks proves himself as a master of imagination, or something beyond it. This is a Novel that shreds your heart, tears your human sense, and in an intricate way, reveals the complexities of human reason, and so many conflicting things that are capable of existing or co-existing in a single human being and also the complexities of societies, at a particular time of history.

The voice of the story is a Scottish girl who leaves her job as a receptionist and general helper at a doctor’s practice to do something that would contribute to the war. A fluent French speaker who would pass for closely a native, her father who fought in France in the last war, used to take them, where he had been, to visit the war graves. She also went on exchanges to a French family during the summer holidays, and read French and Italian at the university.

Through a contact that she got on the train on her way from Edinburgh to London, Dick Cannerly, she was able to secure something to do in G section.

’and you presumably know what our aim is in France?

‘Well, you’ve told me, haven’t you?

‘Yes. But in practical terms what this means is that we are encouraging the French to disobey their government-though l use the word’ government’ reluctantly, since one must doubt its real legitimacy. The means at our disposal are what you might call ‘anti-democratic”. We aren’t going round organizing meetings at which we air the anti-Vichy point of view; we’re using guns and explosives. Even the organizational side of our work is only a prelude to violence. The trouble is, Ms. Gray, that this message is still falling on a fairly stony ground. A large number of people welcome the Vichy government and deeply respect the Marshal, but an even greater number are motivated by a fear of something worse-of civil disorder. They fear that the resistance, such as it is, would be the prelude to a full-scale Communist revolution. So they cling to the idea of stability, of law and order and turn their face away from the actual shape it takes.”

The task was very simple: first to accompany Yves-some calm taciturn little man, acting as his chaperone, until they are safely arrived at the house near Uzerche, where he would join forces with a very busy little network and she would then wish him bon voyage. But aside to this she had her own personal ambitions.

While in France, she was to be called Dominique Guilbert, born in 1917 and was married to a clerk in Angouleme who was now a prisoner of war in Germany, and was traveling to visit her sick father who lived in Limoges. In addition to her cover name Dominique; her field name was to be Daniele. Additionally her hair was cropped and colored although G-section had not anticipated the possibility for a public bath house due to fuel shortage that she was to encounter later in Lauverate exposing a certain inconsistency in coloring.

During a train journey, she kept herself distracted with newspapers, to conceal what she thought was her obvious identity as English.

 The news in the paper was gloomy. The Russians were in retreat, as the Germans drove them back from town to town, the Japanese were threatening Singapore; the Americans had in theory joined the war, but for all popular belief that this meant the allies must win, it seemed to Charlotte they had as yet made little difference.

She resented the anguish that reading the newspaper brought and felt he news of the deaths keenly; the war had aroused in her a feeling that surprised her. When she was a girl her father had taken the family to France and pointed at the million acre graveyards of the British dead; Charlotte did not take in all he said about the war, but even at the age of seven understood that such a thing could never be endured again. An unthinking allegiance to a national cause seemed to have been the motive that led million men to die, and the danger of such thinking had been alive in the calculations of all the people she had known.

Yet something had changed. She had come to see the enemy as not one competing cause whose selfish aims were defensible as any other’s, but as a plain manifestation of evil. When she told Cannerly on the train that she was patriotic, she was not saying quite what his easy smile suggested he thought; she was saying that, despite the implicit danger, and against her former judgment, she had come to feel this way. What she meant was that she had unwittingly developed an almost motherly identification with the men being killed. She despised their killers. There was no doubt in her mind; and although she was not particularly pleased to have been driven up to this conviction, she saw no possibility of its changing.pg. 37

After Dominique had delivered Yves to his final destination, where he was in deep cover, and according to Mr. Jackson no longer needed her guiding hand, any further communication between them would be through wireless and would come through Octave. She however could not take her plane back. She would stay in France until she felt she had done something worthwhile. More urgent even than this was her need to find Gregory. To fly home now would be to admit that he was dead, and this was something that she could to do. She had no idea how she would set about finding him, but merely by being in France she had a better chance. If she gave up on Gregory then she was giving up faith in her own life.

She needed to get herself as soon as possible to Clermont-Ferrand; to track down Monsieur Chollet in his garage and see if Gregory had called; and, if not, to use whatever method her cunning and determination could devise to go out in the dark and find him.

He had told her that he would be flying a Halifax, but it’s when she received a message of his disappearance from Borowski, that she discovered he had been on a mission using a Lysander, a tiny monoplane.

When she moved to London, she shared a tiny icy flat with Daisy and Sally, whose ghastly boyfriend Terence had got them all invited to a literary party on the same evening she arrived. While she felt she did earn her right to the party, and in fact did not want to go to this party or any party at all, she would do it for Daisy. If she seemed aloof, Daisy might complain to her mother in Gloucestershire, who in turn might tell her mother in Edinburgh. It was through this ancient friendship of the two women, though they never saw each other anymore, that her place in the flat had been arranged; and even if it was not much of a flat, she owed daisy something. Pg. 23.

It was at this party that she met Peter Gregory and their affair developed quickly but never seems to have the affinity or commitment to last. He is a pilot in a field of war, and while he has survived when his friends perished, this luck to cheat death is not all promissory, for the war could last forever. He is later to regret leaving for that fateful mission without letting Charlotte know.

He had contemplated a switch to night flying, something that required a different kind of skill from the day time flying he had been taught. It required trust, and he believed he was good at trust, at least where his own safety was concerned. He had come to think he was inviolable though his friends were all dead.

“Flying by night was a violation of instinct; there were no steeples or bridges from which to take a bearing, no flash of wingtip or underbelly to show the vital presence of other aircraft……….Even when you swore you could feel the brush of rooftops on the undercarriage, you must believe the altimeter’s finger pointing at 10,000 feet.”

While he was lucky to survive a crash with the Lysander, he had a fractured tibia, suspected but undiagnosed by the vet who had been contacted by a stallholder who knew that his sympathies were reliable. Unfortunately, as an Englishman he could not be taken in for a surgery. Gregory the unsinkable, the unkillable: lucky to have survived the crash, lucky it was so near the landing zone, lucky that he was picked by sympathetic people.

He had told Charlotte that he seemed completely incapable of crashing, having been straight through a squadron of messerschmitts after his ammunition had run out and wasn’t even scratched. He had flown upside down a hundred feet from the ground to give the impression of being out of control and somehow managed not to touch a tree. Even when his plane’s been damaged, it’s seemed to fly normally. He would come back. He was indestructible. But what are war-time promises?

And for the belief in this particular man, a remarkable man and the purity of the feelings she felt for him and believed he had for her, a force superior than any other guiding force; Charlotte believed that she could not organize her life until she knew if he was alive or dead. Unfortunately, the garage man at Clermont-ford did not seem to have an idea about the disappearance of Gregory, much as he had indicated that she could contact him if anything went wrong.

Octave found her a job as a servant girl at his father Levade’s domaine. A weird man who was a painter, a Jew, thought by some of his village mates to be a Satanist as well. This is despite his conversion to Christianity 10 years before.

Peter had not understood her romantic feeling for France such that had got it into her head that she ought to be dropped into France. She felt that being in France gave increased the chances of finding him. It was during this prolonged stay that she got to learn of the Duguay boys and later form such an attachment to them, so that she often visited them while not working at the Domaine:

Andre was almost seven, Jacob only four. Perhaps the complexities of the politics being discussed in Madame Galliot’s ironmongery would not have made sense to him given his tender age. The anti-Semitic remarks at the shop closely touched his family.

‘For years they’ve been undermining us, keeping all the best jobs to themselves, swindling proper French people. The day they say no Jew should be a school teacher anymore, that was the best day we’ve seen round here for a long, long time.

‘I didn’t know Duguay was one of them,’……’he seemed like nice enough type. He was no trouble to anyone and I don’t think his business was dishonest’

‘Oh, but the mother, though. A typical Israelite,’ said Madame Galliot. ‘They changed their name to Duguay to take us all in.’

Hearing his family name, Andre found the courage to speak and asked for candles. While this seemed to give him a surge of courage, and nothing more to the effect of those hate spinning words of five adults, it’s clear that when his voice brought him into view, it disparaged and scattered their thinking, splitting their guilty at the sight of the toddler.

Unfortunately those words would soon after his sprint uphill, make out a new meaning that would halt the family’s existence forever. It was not clear why their house was locked, something unusual. Neither was the Star of David planted on the door of the house. The mother had tried to explain the shortage of food, that they lived in difficult times, something Andre found difficult to understand.

Benard, a gendarme had put their parents on the train, a special train, upon visit from the Vichy police. He would pass as a sadistic who had seen an opportunity to have his sadistic impulses made legal, the same as locals such as Benech whose guiless beliefs regarding the occupation are amusing. Benech feared a communist revolution more than the German occupation for he felt that the occupation provided the communists a chance for a revolution against traditional France.

When Andre’s mother became hysterical, weeping the father had started weeping too. And if they could not save themselves they could perhaps save their little one, Jacob. She took him to the door of the cellar, and despite his spirited screams, they locked him there. Interesting that the change of names, and even religion to devout Catholics to have a sense of belonging could not change their identity as foreigners and prevent them from being rounded off to the refugee camps. While wicked Benard, in his sense of being a law abiding citizen, becomes part of this plot, he at least allows for the ‘missing statuses of the boys. This would not be sustained forever, because the Duguay boys are used as collateral when he came with the Nazis alongside Benech to take Levade.

It’s an apparent difficulty to implore a 7 and 4 year old to be brave and try not to worry over the absence of their parents, even when there had been such an intimate physical closeness with the mother, that instantly turns their world in hopelessness and despair.

The boys had been hidden at Sylvie Carriteu’s, in the rafters and could not be allowed downstairs. Her mother who kept watch over them enjoyed looking after the children and saw it as a natural act of female kindness. Although she accepted that Jewish people were dishonest and anti-French, and that the Vichy legislation to restrain their activities and confiscate their businesses was overdue, she didn’t see how the little ones were to blame: after all, it was not Andre or Jacob’s fault that they were born Jewish. Her daughters view was more developed, which was shy it was she who had been approached by Julien to look after the children in the first place.

Andre—because he had no power to change his circumstances, his will to survive and his legacy of natural content deceived him into experiencing them as bearable. To this, Sylvie told her mother that she thought him adaptable.

Yet something was checked in him. Without his mother’s constant touch, he shrank a little; his movements became less fluid ; he walked more often than he skipped; he remembered himself more, never any longer forgetting to say please or thank you. Slowly too, he began to register his father’s absence; he missed his physical bulk and the stability it represented; he missed the feeling of bodily release that followed their wrestling matches. And for all the way the observable changes were so small, he still had fits of misery.p.169-70.

And while his mind was preoccupied with what to do with André and Jacob, in the face of imminent prosecution of Jews, although from the newspapers it was not so difficult to make out what was happening, from what he had seen or heard, there would be no let-up in the persecution of Jews. He did not pause to consider his own position. His father Levade was three-quarter Jewish, and Julien three-eighths Jewish but since this ridiculous fraction had never mattered to him before, he thought it would not matter to anyone else in France.

Then as the war escalated the free zone became occupied, things were getting dangerous. Levade was taken by the Nazis who had been brought by Benech, and try as they may, no papers could be located to prove his identity as French and to save the Duguay boys, Julien confessed that his father was a Jew. They took him on that fateful cold night, and left a Nazi in charge of the domaine.

Sheer ingenuity or probably luck had them convince the German soldier that they needed to sleep together as a couple for the last time. To arouse his anger giving charlotte a chance to escape and ensure that the boys were moved to safety and for Julien to move somewhere safe, they resorted to making love noisily to agitate the German. The trick worked and when he came over to push Charlotte away, this gave Julien a chance to wrestle him and take possession of his gun. The plan was to kill Benech, to which he succeeds. The kids were not to survive later after being moved to Anne-Marie’s and something tells me that Pauline Benoit, a Gaullist told on them.

Partly the redemptive bit is having Benech exterminated, and the determination of Julien in doing this would provide safety to the boys and possibly give him a chance to escape, or so he thought. Later before Charlotte left for London, she made a trip to Paris to see Levade for she had heard the trains were destined there. Of course nothing had prepared her for the shock of the concentration camps, and much as she managed to get a message to him, explaining that Julien was trying to save the boys, Monsieur Levade died that evening. And as she waited some more, when children were dropped, she thought she has seen the Duruguay boys:

In the camps they had to wear a yellow cloth with a star, and anyone seen without it in the camp would automatically be included in the next transport and so was any internee seen on the women’s staircases.

It’s painful to see Sylvie and Anne-Marie lose the boys to the German soldiers even when Sylive was willing to compromise herself to the soldiers to save the boys; an act Anne-Marie’s mother could not fathom and told on the boys. The horrible sound of childish screams upstairs as they were roughed away is extremely devastating.

The rumours was that there was no work at the other end of the trains and that the Jews were being exterminated by the thousand. People would throw themselves from storied floors once they learnt that their names were on the list and in the camps there seemed to be no sympathy for the dead for someone else would go in the trains on their behalf.

“Outside again, he went over to where the bus was now leaving the compound. There  mire buses had been and gone in the meantime, and Andre found a number of children of his age wandering among the hundreds of forgotten bundles and bags, looking for some identifying mark. One boy sat cross-legged on the cinders, his head between his knees. Andre noticed the scabs and sores on the back of his hands, which were clamped round his neck. The boy appeared to be immobilized; it was as though he had found the point beyond which he could not go. Andre saw the fair hairs on his neck, matted together with filth…pg. 442

Back inside:

“there was a solid wailing in the room as though the children’s nerve had given way in a collective wave of despair. The older ones could no longer comfort the younger, and even the women who tried to help them were in tears”

The gossip of gas and crematoria would seem far-fetched but the reality of the destination was sealed when they got to the bus. There was no sense of time passing in the train and the stretched hours would not amount to days, though they were in the second night. A man had died in their wagon and everyone was edging away from the body. And finally the train came to a halt. It was deep night.]

There was elation: at last they had arrived. Then some smoke came through the slit, a pungent smoke.

..”Now they were in a line of children and old people. They were climbing into Lorries.

Andre was at the back. They went past a long ditch in which ragged flames were rising. From a tipped lorry, what looked to André like giant dolls with broken limbs were being poured into the trench.

They stopped at tow whitewashed farmhouses with thatched roofs. The lorry’s headlights showed up pretty fruit trees.

Now they were naked. It was very cold in this room. Jacob took André’s hand and found that there was already something in it-a tin soldier.

Andre kissed Jacob’s shorn head, the stubble tender on his lips.

There was another room, another door, with bolts and rubber seals, over whose threshold the two boys, among many others, went through icy air, and disappeared. Pg 460.

Gregory found his way back to London through Italy, and into North Africa. Sounds major luck for someone with a fractured leg and terrible French in an occupied country. Charlotte went back to London, helpless that there’s nothing more she could have done to save the boys. Through her reconciliation with the father, we are let to know more horrors of the previous war, that left him, and many others devastated. Octave wrote to Daniele to let her know that the boys were taken, he had not heard from the father though he hoped the worst rumours about the camps and so on were not true (poor soul) and that he had hid in some hills for safety. Despite the squalor and the shame and bloodshed that would come, he still felt great hope about freedom to come.

The winner is the resolution of redemptive love that withstands the war-time promises….

..as Charlotte reunites with her lover Gregory…..As they came near to it, Charlotte slipped her hand into Gregory’s and found that it had already contained something – the handle of his stick.

She held on tight to his arm, nevertheless, as they walked through the porch, stepped over the stone threshold, worn smooth and low by many centuries of people passing through. They crossed into the cold interior of the church, heavy with the scent of cut flowers and the murmuring of the organ, into the soft air, and disappeared.pg. 496

Whilst it’s a fictional book, the Author indicates that it heavily relies on actual or tries to represent the historical background as it actually was. If you are a lover of history, you will like the powerful representation of the harrowing incidents surrounding WW2, and if you are not into history, you can never escape the reality that our present lives have been shaped by past events, and how we respond to it, may determine how we handle or prevent future recurrences. There is a stark contrast, for example, with the dissemination of information today for it can be argued that the social media, and even traditional media, would not allow the world to be dark to events such as the horrible holocaust of the Jews. There is consolation in the fact that the world has a medium to know, and possibly nudge an action. This is in contrast to times discussed in the novel (clearly not an information age, like today) when all they relied on was the wireless to send coded messages. I got thinking, ‘but how miserable!’, and perhaps this explains why by the time the world realized, the lives of 6 Million Jews & other minorities were no more. Gassed poisonously and cremated.

British people laughed at Hitler and his preposterous acolytes, but, as German philosopher long before the Nazis might have argued, abstract evil did not choose the form in which it emerged in the particular. Pg. 122

Whilst the statement is debatable in many ways, I find many of the atrocities that were done in history utterly disgusting. Despairing. Squalid. Mean. Horrid. Undignified deaths. The disturbing bit is while many know of the holocaust of the Jews, and there was the international backing, there is little known of our own histories. For example the Namibian Holocaust, or the holocaust in Congo, or the slave trade in East Africa to Persia or did the world just choose to forget that the trail of blood existed or treated them as fables? Or are terrible times best forgotten?

Despite being awful base creatures, man still has ability to be good. Sometimes evil and good would exist together, or sometimes next to each other. You will find this in beautiful souls like Julien (Octave). His words to Charlotte:

If you don’t base your actions on what is right then you have nothing left to fall back on incase the practicalities fail. I would rather die myself. I am not going to be responsible for the death of the children.