Happy Easter Everyone!
I hope everyone is safe and well and not facing any criminal investigations for assault on those with whom you are incarcerated…I mean cocooned 🙂
Easter Greetings from the cottage where the sunshine and sand of Australia is already but a dim and distant memory! It’s nice to be home all the same. the sun’s shining and everyone is making the best of the situation.
This is so bizarre isn’t it? Off all of the things we might have considered possible, this was not on the radar, not on mine anyway.
In the course of my research over the years, as a historian and an author, I have read many thousands of testimonies of people who lived through particular times in human history. I am a history teacher as you know, and so the big picture, what was happening politically, diplomatically and militarily is always of interest to me, but as an author, that is background, context, for what happens to my characters. What fascinates me is people. Ordinary folks like us, and how we adapt to the circumstances life throws at us.
A great example is during the Blitz in London in the 40s. People were undoubtedly concerned about the bombs that were decimating their city every night, but if you read people’s accounts of that time, their minds were taken up with what to have for dinner, where to get enough wool to knit their child a winter sweater, how to bake a cake to celebrate a birthday without any sugar, and it always strikes me, how incredibly resilient we are as a species.
We know about the big scary things, of course, bombs, pandemics, invading armies, whatever, but apart from doing as we are told by the authorities, there is not much else we can do, so we focus on what we can control. They did it then, and we’re doing it now.
This is a very worrisome disease, and I pray that none of you get it, or if you do, that you recover quickly and fully.
I know it’s hard, especially if you are older. My own parents are sitting at home on their own this Easter Sunday and I know they’d give their right arms to have us all round the table for a big family lunch with chocolate and children and all the normal things we would be doing were it not for Corona.
I’m sure many of you are the same. I know it’s difficult, and it’s lonely and it’s scary, but we are just as tough as the people I write about and you read about, they had their challenges and they came through it by being kind and generous and looking out for each other, and above all facing this together as a united force, shoulder to shoulder. I think we’ll do the same.
And for us, in this age of technology, the hands of friendship can stretch so much further. Take this one for example, all the way from my house to yours, wherever you are.
Of course ’tis and ill wind that doesn’t blow somebody good as the old saying goes, and so, due to lockdown, I finished the third book in The Star and the Shamrock last week. It’s set in 1950 and its focus is on one of the Bannon children mainly. The war may be over but there are still some old scores to settle and the past has an awful habit of reemerging when we least expect it to.
The nuns too will be going to the advance team in early May so hopefully released middle of next month, so you wont have long to wait. That book is called The Sisters of the Southern Cross. I’ll tell you the story about how it came to be next time.
So, for now, I wish you all well, take care, do as you’re told by those who know, try not to listen to those who don’t, (so much nonsense and lies around right now) and we will get through this, together but apart.
Le grá agus buiochas,
Your friend,
Jean xx