mns  2008-06-23 19:59   

We drove to Derbyshire for the first of two appearances in the Derbyshire Literary Festival. The Peak District is stunning, green fields, stone walls, rolling valleys among the hills, with sheep that looked like they had been painted onto the grass. I was reminded of one of my friends telling me she had gone there looking for Mr Darcy. As I had my Mr Darcy in the car with me my mission was somewhat different.

I get very nervous before ‘appearances’ but both talks in Clay Cross and in Chesterfield went well with brilliant audiences and excellent questions. I love the question and answer part and I met the nicest people. My favourite member of the audience was a guide dog who watched me carefully while I spoke, splayed on the ground in the front row, and then happily (and unnoticed) helped himself to some chocolate cake after the lecture.
Both evenings ended with the long drive back to Chester into the sunset.

Then it was off to Germany where my second novel, Missing, is on the universities’ reading list. If I was nervous before Derbyshire it was nothing to how I now felt. My greatest fear was not being understood, but my opening joke about five Germans in an Audi Quattro went down to roars of laughter. This was very reassuring as I was using it as a sounding board for comprehension.
It’s odd how the stories of our past which are so much a part of us are, in fact, interesting or intriguing to other people. We think nothing of the oddities of our own upbringing – after all, that is all we know; but when we relay tales of the past to other people it becomes clear by their reaction that one man’s norm is definitely not another’s.

I had forgotten what it was like to be in my late teens and early twenties and I can only hope that I was as enthusiastic as these students were. I also realised that when you are that age you don’t realise that adults in performing mode can be absolutely terrified by the sight of eighty unknown faces looking at one with interest.
A few of my German friends, both real-life and from online turned up and that added to the sense of reassurance that I had got from my joke – a joke which JC had said no one would find funny.

I have this story about David Lodge which I had told in Derbyshire to illustrate how authors take ‘things’ they hear and mould them into their own books. I discovered just before my lecture in Germany that the students had been studying David Lodge, so I included my story and they enjoyed it.
This is how it goes:
Back in the early 1970’s, my mother who had played hockey for Ireland, was now the non playing captain of the Irish Ladies hockey team, and she and the team were going to the States for an international tournament. My mother was, understandably, very excited – though I think we thought she should be at home cooking for us and minding us in general. Anyway, the mother took off on her plane with her team in tow, and a third of the way over the Atlantic one of the engines failed; the pilot turned back and then a second engine failed. It became clear they would not make it back to Shannon Airport, and the pilot was forced to crash land somewhere in the west of Ireland. My mother, being the most senior person on board, was asked if she would lead the passengers in a prayer. I doubt if this would be the norm in any other country, but this was the early Seventies and it was an Irish aircraft and a prayer was required.

I do understand that the whole experience was terrifying and who knows how my mother’s mind was working, but, for reasons best known to herself she could only think of the Grace before meals, and that is the prayer she led the panicking passengers through. Think about it; ‘For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful…’

Anyway, the plane came down in a field, and the passengers were evacuated off through chutes. My siblings and I were watching the news that evening when we saw what had happened, and heard, with the embarrassment of children at their parents’ actions, how she had said the Grace before meals. I think we were as concerned about the prayer as we were about our mother’s ordeal.
Put that thought on hold.

Years later my sister read Changing Places by David Lodge; when she finished it, she passed it to me and asked me to read it urgently, not saying why. So, I’m reading away and I come to this hysterically funny paragraph about this unfortunate person reciting The Grace before Meals as a plane is about to come down.
On the one hand I can see that this is very funny (because it isn’t my mother) but on the other I’m struck, as my sister had been, by the coincidence in the stories.
We wrote to David Lodge and asked him was there any way he could have known about our mother and the prayer. And he wrote back and said that he had read it years earlier in Private Eye and he had cut it out because he had thought it was so funny, and that it was indeed based on our mother and her plane crash landing.

I loved our time in Germany, my friend Orla’s hospitality, sitting in her wonderful garden, visiting the local bridge club, and meeting new friends. I loved the event in the university and the students’ reception, and the Eis-kaffee in the Orangerie of the local castle afterwards sitting in the sun both relaxing and recovering. Having once lived in Germany and having once been married to a German I did not think it was somewhere I would be visiting again, but I am so glad I did. It was a truly brilliant experience.