Period Piece

As LP Hartley so famously put it: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there".

When I set out to write a book about my two mothers ( my German birthmother and the English one who brought me up)  I never quite realized how much research it would entail.

circa 1912, 1954,1983

Here is Betty who appears in the story as Ruth. Then Elizabeth, the 'fortunate child' of the title, who appears as Jane, last Claudia (Julia in the book).

Here is Betty in the garden of her grandparents' house in England 

-- a privileged child circa 1915.

Garden of the architectural museum, Wroclaw. photo: Elizabeth Wix 1999

My research took me to Wroclaw in Poland, a city which had once been Breslau and a part of Germany until after the Second World War .

How busy the square is --the photo probably taken at the turn of the last century. The older parts of city have been beautifully restored after being almost entirely destroyed in 1945.

Breslau circa 1904

My story is about England and Germany, mothers and daughters, 

families, and a little about Europe's sad history.

This is Mall House in Faversham, Kent, called Fairleigh Lodge in the book,

 where some of the story takes place.

The drawing room of Mall House about 1952 --a house I only dimly remember. To me it is a quintessentially English house. Note the Victorian water colors, the loose covers, the flowers and the family photos in pride of place on the mantelpiece.

The book A Fortunate Child is now available as a download on iTunes here. or as real world book here. In both cases you can read the first thirty pages free  --by which time you will have some idea if you will enjoy reading the whole thing.

My Favorite George Orwell Quotes

I was thinking about George Orwell yesterday and how he lived through two world wars and an economic depression so I relate to a lot of what he writes about due to living in what I call a depression (not a great recession) and two major wars being fought in two separate countries at the same time right now in the year 2010. He wrote his famous book "1984" in the year 1949 and yet it could have been written last year it is so relevant to our times as well as his various quotes.
I thought I would list some of my favorite quotes written by him over the years and in no particular order here they are:

1. All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

2. Big Brother is watching you.

3. But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

4. Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.

5. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

6.In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

7. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.

8. To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

9. War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

10. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.