Although I didn’t know how long it would take me to write a memoir about my mother and myself, I did begin researching my mother’s childhood in Gibraltar and England long before I actually started writing the book. While my mother was still alive, I traveled to Gibraltar or Gib, as she always called it, to see firsthand what it was like to grow up on the Rock on the edge of the Mediterranean where you lunched across the border in Spain and spent the afternoon watching polo in Tangiers. The Barbary apes loped down to town to snatch the laundry off the rooftops, oranges grew on trees and the breezes blew balmy and tasted of salt.
I returned with lots of stories and a book of photographs that my mother pored over every day as her memory faded and her childhood began to feel more immediate and real than the visitor who’d just dropped in for tea.
I promised her that I would visit the places in England where she spent her childhood holidays and the years of the war, but as she grew increasingly frail and disoriented, I didn’t feel comfortable taking an extended trip out of the country. Once she was gone, I made the pilgrimage in her honor and in her memory.
My fiction writing has always been enriched by an intimate knowledge of the place where I’ve chosen to set my books. Whether it’s my grandmother’s house in Connecticut or an island off the New England coast or the mill town in Vermont where Lewis Hine took some of his best-known child labor photographs, I’ve learned that knowledge of setting enriches and expands my understanding of the characters in my fiction.
When I came to the end of the first draft of my memoir, Daughter of Spies,(Regal House, October, 2022) it was time for me to go see where my mother lived in the years between her evacuation from Gibraltar as a young teenager and her transatlantic crossing as an eighteen-year-old pregnant bride. If I walked through the rooms of her convent school, stood in her grandmother’s Cotswold garden, and wandered the hallways of the Yorkshire castle where she met my father, then surely, I’d better understand the determined young British colonial who left her job as a decoding agent for MI5 so she could marry an American parachutist twelve years her senior, a man she barely knew.
As I began to make plans for this journey, I discovered to my amazement that all the important places in my mother’s life are open to the public. Her convent school in Ware is a hotel. Stanway House, the secretarial school she attended to prepare for “war work,” is a stately mansion open to the public by appointment. Her best friend’s home is a Gothic Revival castle, now open for tours. Her father’s childhood home in Surrey is a wedding venue and office space.
Would I know her better if I walked in her footsteps? The only way to find out was to go see. If you’d like to join me on this journey, open this book, Following in My Mother’s Footsteps, on this website.
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