To Jim Hollister and all the Park Rangers who make history come alive.
Chapter
1
Lexington,
Massachusetts
September
2017
My husband Rick and
I had travelled from Europe where we live part time in Southern France and part
time in Geneva, Switzerland.
Despite being
senior citizens, we’re relatively new newlyweds. This was our memory tour. He
had shown me where he had grown up in upstate New York. It was my turn to show
him my childhood Boston and its surrounding area. I wanted him to see the
battlefield where the first battle of the American Revolution had been fought.
Bruce Davidson,
an artist friend living nearby, joined us. He was a second-generation friend.
His father and I had been lunch buddies for years. My love for Bruce only grew
that night in Geneva when he called to tell me his dad had died.
At the end of
the call, I said, “I’m sorry you lost your dad.” His reply was, “I’m sorry you
lost your friend.” His empathy when he was suffering reaffirmed what a kind man
he is. Time with Bruce, whether in France or New England, is always a gift.
A tour bus pulled
in and spit out a flock of men and woman in our age group. One woman looked at
the green grass through the battlefield leading to the Visitor’s Center and
said in a strong southern accent, “I’m not walking that. There’s nothing to
see.” I wanted to tell her, “This is where men died so you could have your
American country,” but I didn’t.
Like other
battlefields I’ve visited, including Bull Run and Normandy Beach, Lexington, is
peaceful now. The horror of what happened 245 years before has disappeared. To
me, the ghosts of those who sacrificed their lives for a cause are still present.
There’s everything to see: peace at a price.
Rick, Bruce and I walked toward the battlefield. I’d been there several times. When I lived in the area it was a good place to take visiting friends.
As always, I stopped at the gravestone of two unknown British soldiers. As always it bothered me. I wondered who they were. Why had they joined the British army? Did their families, if they had any in Britain, know they had died? What was their life like in the army? Were they really devoted to their King?
I’d done
half-hearted research to find out more about these unknown men thinking maybe I
could create a novel about them. It had never passed the thinking stage.
I had learned the general history of the founding of the United States in school from the American point of view. At university, in an English history class with Professor Peter Blewett, a British native, I was given the other side. It was an awakening. However, his two lectures on the subject several decades ago were not enough to create a novel.
Chapter
2
Geneva,
Switzerland
September
Time
to start research using blogs, internet, websites, books and podcasts. I would
need to reach out to historians to help me create characters and situations
within the context of reality.
September
always seemed to be more of the start of a new year than January 1st. Probably
all those years beginning school, my daughter doing the same in September. When
I worked corporate the best time for launching something new was when people were
back from summer holidays.
When I
first moved to Switzerland, everyone told me how beautiful the autumns were. September
arrived and the leaves turned — to yellow not red. Pretty yes, but a letdown in
comparison to New England’s vivid reds.
Living
in Switzerland is like living in a postcard. When we leave our Geneva studio,
we see the Jura mountains. Turn around, the Alps are visible. It’s a
five-minute meander to Lac Léman. The lake’s colors can be anything from a
light to navy blue to green. If the Bise blows, the high waves churn the water to
a surly brown.
Autumn
wasn’t totally a new writing start. I was doing a final polish of Day Care
Moms, strengthening my verbs, doing a global search for ‘ly’ to eliminate
as many adverbs as possible, rearranging paragraphs and checking for
continuity. When one spends a year plus on a book, it is possible to have a
person that was six feet four in chapter two shrink to five foot nine in
chapter 48.
My Day
Care Mom characters Ashley, Sally, Brenda, Sally-Marie and Maura were packing
their bags and moving out of my brain where they had lived for the past 16
months. They were being replaced by one of the two unknown British soldiers under
that gravestone in Lexington. For some reason that I don’t understand, I only
wanted to feature one. The idea of creating a plausible life for a British
soldier that would be killed at Lexington grew into an obsession.
My
knowledge of early American history was rusty. When I was researching Murder
in Caleb’s Landing, I had bought The Complete Works of the Mayflower Pilgrims
by Caleb Johnson, which included every document from the early colonists. The
book is almost three inches thick.
Reviewing
it for information for my potential novel revealed two major problems. My novel
was to be from the point of view of the British not Americans; the British
wanted to suppress the uprising. The second was that the documentation in
Johnson’s book stopped long before the Revolution.
I e-mailed
Minute Man National Park asking about the British soldiers who had died. Within
a day, Ranger Jim Hollister wrote back saying that they didn’t know. He told me
that each year the British Consul General based in Boston laid flowers at the
gravestone. That so fascinated me, it triggered a second plot for the novel, a
modern aspect. Little did I know how Ranger Jim and I would send lots of e-mails
back and forth. I would see him in videos that would provide so many details
that I wanted to hug him, which between distance and a pandemic was impossible.
He told
me about a blog by J.J. Bell, www.boston1775.blogspot.com, with so much information about what Boston was like prior
to the start of hostilities I felt as if I were living there. It was then I
made a commitment to write the novel not just think about it.
Unlike
my other novels, when I had a good idea of the plot before I started, there was still so much I didn’t know. I wanted to be as historically accurate as possible
without losing the tension. I joked to my husband I couldn’t have General Gage,
Governor of Massachusetts in 1775, communicate with his London superiors via
the internet. I could, however, make sure he responded in the novel to the
communiques he received via a slow ship.
I
needed to create a British soldier.
I am a
restless sleeper and often wake around two in the morning and stay awake for a
couple of hours. Often my best ideas come at that time. I don’t need a notebook
to jot them down. Even if I did, I might have trouble reading my writing.
A
woman kept jumping into my head. It was as if she were sitting on my bed saying,
“Use me, use me.” She wouldn’t go away. My Third Culture Kid novels
combine the past and present, but I wasn’t planning to do this for Lexington.
I gave up and invited her in.
I
named her Daphne after a British friend whom I’d been e-mailing before going to
sleep. Maybe I could play with the Daphne character while I was trying to find
my British soldier and doing my research. I wanted to align the character with
the past but had no idea how to do it.
I did
know she needed to be British. I decided to make her a new arrival to Boston as
the wife of the British Consul General. She would be a newlywed.
I tried
to contact the British Consulate in Boston. They did not respond to e-mails and
their phone system was one with multiple numbers to choose from, and as I
worked my way through the menu I was timed out. Good thing my international
calls are part of my telecom package. Google images were a limited help.
I
decided to write around what I didn’t know, and have the British Consul General
in Boston housed temporarily on Commonwealth Avenue because of repairs to the
normal house used by the embassy.
To be continued tomorrow.
Posts
