Necklace of Warm Snow (Paperback)

Necklace of Warm Snow tells in parallel the stories of Alistair, a British agent in wartime France and his daughter, Hilary, a fifties child. Alistair meets and falls in love with a young Jewish woman, Lena, who is in hiding from the Paris round-ups of 1942. Alistair has left a girlfriend, Margaret, behind in London but realises that his love for Lena is much more profound. When he is pulled out of France after one of the people from a group he was working with is arrested, he has to leave Lena behind. Lena, pregnant with Alistair’s child, is arrested just before she is due to cross into Switzerland. She is never seen again.

After the War Margaret takes the forlorn Alistair under her wing and they marry and have two children, Hilary and Nicholas. It is a loveless marriage and Alistair retreats into a world of his own. He finds one more chance of happiness with his young mistress, Sarah. Then, finding that he is being made redundant from his job, he decides the moment of truth has arrived for them all. He wants to leave Margaret and live with Sarah, although Sarah, a very independent and up-and-coming artist feels unsure about the best course of action. Alistair decides to take his caravan and drive down to SW France to confront the ghosts of his past in order to be able to move on in his life. During this trip he is murdered.

Hilary’s adult life is blighted by her childhood in which her parents’ marriage was a battlefield. She lurches from one unsatisfactory relationship to another and feels increasingly resentful that her father never really engaged with his children, blaming him for her failure to relate to men. Some years after the unsolved murder she helps her mother clear out his bureau and discovers some notes that he was preparing for a wartime memoir as well as a photo of Sarah. She embarks on a quest to find out more about her father. What she discovers leads to her solving the crime but, more importantly, to coming to understand herself and the direction her life must take.

A la fin de l'année 1942, l'officier anglais G.R. Starr, chargé d'organiser la subversion et le sabotage s'était installé au village. Lors du débarquement des Alliés, le 6 juin 1944, des volontaires affluent à Castelnau. Quelques jours plus tard, le 21 juin, aura lieu une bataille qui fera de nombreux morts et laissera le village entièrement ruiné. En 1951, un monument, en forme de péristyle, a été élevé à l'ouest du village.

(At the end of 1942, British officer, George Starr, organiser of subversion and sabotage, settled in the village. As soon as the Allies landed on June 4, 1944, volunteers gathered at Castelnau. Several days later on June 21, a battle was to take place that would leave many dead and practically destroy the village. In 1951 a monument in the shape of a peristyle was set up to the west of the village.)

The second theme I wanted to tackle was murder, not as in the murder mystery novel, but as an event that tears families apart. The Cartland case, in which a man was murdered while caravanning in the South of France, was at the back of mind because I had known the daughter of the murder victim at university. The unlikely suspect in this case was Jeremy Cartland, the victim's son. He has written a harrowing account of his treatment at the hands of the French justice system, The Cartland File, Linkline Publications, Brighton, 1978. In his book, Cartland refers to the Drummond murder of 1952 and the possibility that both Drummond and his father were the victims of some kind of revenge killings linked to the men's wartime activities.

On a broader level, I wanted to deal with the way that traumatic experiences of the past do not end with the people who experience them directly, but reverberate down the generations. I did not experience the wartime horrors myself, but that period cast a shadow over my generation because of the scars it had left.

Trying to piece these themes together coherently was a structural problem. A simply chronological sequence was never satisfactory. I decided to tell two stories in parallel until the point at which Alistair, the wartime agent, was murdered so that the two generations and their experiences could be juxtaposed.

The source of detail for the sections dealing with Alistair's experiences as a wartime agent in France derive from the comprehensive information in M.R.D. Foot's book, SOE in France, HMSO, London, 1966. He describes the difficulty of finding agents whose French was sufficiently proficient to put them beyond suspicion:
Remarkably few people born English speakers can manage impeccable French: this put the severest brake on recruiting for work in France. It was the language difficulty that forced SOE to use so high a proportion of agents who had one French parent or who had spent so many years in France that they had acquired the necessary entire command over what they said in French. (p.52)

I was also fascinated by a story told me by my husband about one of his distant cousins, one Strachan Turnbull. He had led a nomadic life in France as a child, travelling from village to village while his father earnt a living as an itinerant artist. This gave him a command not only of 'classical' French but of several dialects too. He later served as a wartime agent in France making full use of his linguistic versatility.

Not all agents were scrupulous in language matters, however:
George Starr, F Section's organiser in Gascony, was once waiting for an appointment near the till of a busy café in Toulouse, full among others of Gestapo Officers in plain clothes.... Just as a waiter appeared from the back with a tray of drinks, two weary men in battle dress came in from the street and walked up to the cashier; one said with a loud and strong English accent, 'Nous - officers RAF - pouvez-vous nous aider?' The waiter promptly dropped his tray; by the time the ensuing brouhaha was over the airforce officers had been spirited out of sight. (Foot, p.98)

It is clear from Foot's book, that many SOE agents were, on the face of it, ill-suited for their role but after the rigorous training programme found themselves ready for combat:
A journalist found that the silent killing instructor 'gave us more and more self-confidence which gradually grew into a sense of physical power and superiority that few men ever acquire. By the time we had finished our training I would willingly have tackled any man, whatever his strength, size or ability'.

This was the passage I had in mind when Alistair finds himself with no choice but to kill a man.