Eliza Graham's Blog - Posts Tagged "the-one-i-was"
The One I Was
Very belatedly and with apologies I have come to this blog at last to write about my new adult novel, The One I Was. It's the story of a young German refugee, Benny, who comes to England in 1939 haunted by an event occurring in his home town just as he leaves. His guilty secret will influence th rest of his life, and draws him closer to his benefactress, Harriet, a glamorous aviatrix who delivers Spitfires for the RAF.
Fastforward a few decades and Harriet's granddaughter Rose is growing up in the same country house that welcomed Benny in 1939, and confronting her own feelings of guilt and confusion as her family comes under the malign influence of a charismatic newcomer.
Brought together later on as Benny lies on his deathbed, Rose and Benny untangle the threads binding them together -- just as the violence of the past threatens Benny's last days.
The One I Was
Fastforward a few decades and Harriet's granddaughter Rose is growing up in the same country house that welcomed Benny in 1939, and confronting her own feelings of guilt and confusion as her family comes under the malign influence of a charismatic newcomer.
Brought together later on as Benny lies on his deathbed, Rose and Benny untangle the threads binding them together -- just as the violence of the past threatens Benny's last days.
The One I Was
The One I Was--first chapter
1
Rosamond
Every atom of my body screamed at me to run away from the elegant and classical white house at whose door I stood.
I was a forty-something woman, a professional, a nurse, but I felt like a twelve-year-old again. I forced myself to push the doorbell. Sarah, the housekeeper, opened the front door and let me in. I heard myself exchanging pleasantries with her while my heart beat out a tattoo. I took stock of my surroundings. Duck-egg walls. A chandelier of twisted metal and crystal, hanging from the ceiling like an icicle.
I looked up the staircase, trying to accustom myself to being back at Fairfleet again. My fingers clenched the handles of my suitcase as I drew in a long breath. The house smelled of new paint and the large white lilies on the console table. An older, deeper smell undercut the scent: polished wood and old stone, but it should have been bitter like burning almonds, to remind me of my guilt.
The telephone rang. Sarah frowned. ‘That’ll be the district nurse. Excuse me one moment, Rosamond.’
Some of the balustrading on the staircase had been replaced, but the
work had been done with sensitivity; only someone who knew where to look would have spotted the new spindles. The flagstones replacing the old parquet floor might have been there for centuries. What had I expected: that the house would somehow remember what had happened on a clear, frosty morning just like this, thirty years ago?
I tried to clear my mind, to remember why I was here. I thought about my patient, Benny Gault, and his arrival at this house. Just before the war Fairfleet had taken in a group of Jewish refugee boys from Germany, made them a home while they grew up, and sent them back out into the world to make good lives for themselves. And then the adult Benny Gault had returned years later to buy Fairfleet and make it his own. Now he lay dying upstairs.
Sarah came back in. ‘Sorry about that: come through to the kitchen, Rosamond.’
I moved onwards into the house. I felt more relaxed now I wasn’t dwelling on myself and my past. I was thinking about how Benny must have felt when he’d first arrived in England. Homesick? Relieved? Excited? Possibly all of these.
Rosamond
Every atom of my body screamed at me to run away from the elegant and classical white house at whose door I stood.
I was a forty-something woman, a professional, a nurse, but I felt like a twelve-year-old again. I forced myself to push the doorbell. Sarah, the housekeeper, opened the front door and let me in. I heard myself exchanging pleasantries with her while my heart beat out a tattoo. I took stock of my surroundings. Duck-egg walls. A chandelier of twisted metal and crystal, hanging from the ceiling like an icicle.
I looked up the staircase, trying to accustom myself to being back at Fairfleet again. My fingers clenched the handles of my suitcase as I drew in a long breath. The house smelled of new paint and the large white lilies on the console table. An older, deeper smell undercut the scent: polished wood and old stone, but it should have been bitter like burning almonds, to remind me of my guilt.
The telephone rang. Sarah frowned. ‘That’ll be the district nurse. Excuse me one moment, Rosamond.’
Some of the balustrading on the staircase had been replaced, but the
work had been done with sensitivity; only someone who knew where to look would have spotted the new spindles. The flagstones replacing the old parquet floor might have been there for centuries. What had I expected: that the house would somehow remember what had happened on a clear, frosty morning just like this, thirty years ago?
I tried to clear my mind, to remember why I was here. I thought about my patient, Benny Gault, and his arrival at this house. Just before the war Fairfleet had taken in a group of Jewish refugee boys from Germany, made them a home while they grew up, and sent them back out into the world to make good lives for themselves. And then the adult Benny Gault had returned years later to buy Fairfleet and make it his own. Now he lay dying upstairs.
Sarah came back in. ‘Sorry about that: come through to the kitchen, Rosamond.’
I moved onwards into the house. I felt more relaxed now I wasn’t dwelling on myself and my past. I was thinking about how Benny must have felt when he’d first arrived in England. Homesick? Relieved? Excited? Possibly all of these.
More on The One I Was
The One I Was was titled 'Fairfleet' for the period of two years in which I wrote it, because the house itself seemed to be such a part of the narrative, almost a character in its own right. Eventually I changed the name, because a friend, rightfully, pointed out that it gave the book a nautical, if not naval, air! It is set in inland England, near the historic cities of Oxford and Abingdon, so I was worried that this would be misleading.
The One I Was as a title popped into my head at a random moment and it seemed completely the right title for the book. Benny comes to England as a refugee from Nazi Germany and immediately realizes that to flourish in a new country he needs to reinvent himself into someone irreproachably English. But are we still the same people we were when we were children? And if you try and change yourself into someone else can you always succeed?
There are lots of other things in the The One I Was that fascinate me: topiary animals and peacocks. Appropriately, only last night, a few weeks after the book was published, a friend and I nearly jumped out of our skins when a peacock shrieked at us in the dark. A Spitfire plane also features in the novel as an emblem of freedom and danger, completely irresistible for Harriet Dorner, female pilot.
The One I Was as a title popped into my head at a random moment and it seemed completely the right title for the book. Benny comes to England as a refugee from Nazi Germany and immediately realizes that to flourish in a new country he needs to reinvent himself into someone irreproachably English. But are we still the same people we were when we were children? And if you try and change yourself into someone else can you always succeed?
There are lots of other things in the The One I Was that fascinate me: topiary animals and peacocks. Appropriately, only last night, a few weeks after the book was published, a friend and I nearly jumped out of our skins when a peacock shrieked at us in the dark. A Spitfire plane also features in the novel as an emblem of freedom and danger, completely irresistible for Harriet Dorner, female pilot.
