I loved this book. It was profound and emotionally educational unravelling some of the tangled thoughts about my own parental relationship.
page 474:
I was upset when she commented about how her father was emotionally and mentally damaged by his experiences in WWI.
I began to realise that my own parents may have been proud of me but they never ever praised me in all of my life. My mother once did say I was clever so maybe that counts!
I was in tears towards the end of the book:
"She strained at the memory of her childhood, at the sense of some rapture lost. Yet it all remained like some frozen sea: great blocks of ice, submerged but static, and beyond the melting capacity of her conscious will."......... "her mother would turn form intimacy"page 479 and after:
the author writes about a man's need and fears of being a father, a person, a man as a boy and how men can be a prisoner of sensual desire.... so I started to wonder about how people set themselves free from the chains that they have self-imposed. When I was in my 30s or 40s I doodled many chains and wrote about myself being a prisoner but then I did not know what of! I still have that INNER CHILD THERAPY JOURNAL.
page 482:
I had a kind of revelation. I began to sob suddenly and uncontrollably as I realized that possibly I had never ever really thought about MY LIFE from my parents' viewpoint ... It is what I have been expecting my grown up children to do! I want them to appreciate and understand that I think about their lives from my viewpoint and I think that perhaps one of them hasn't yet understood that and won't until he becomes a parent.
page 483:
I interpret the author's writings:
The noise of shouting and violence... the sight and sound of torment, grief and horror cause the destruction of the softness of love.
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In this novel, Charlotte Gray, a young Scot, became involved with the
French resistance at Vichy, in 1942, during the Second World War. She'd traveled to London to work as a medical receptionist for a Harley Street doctor but on the train
she shared a compartment with two men, one
who works for the secret service and he invites her to contact him when the job gets boring. Despite the war,
social life was in full swing and she soon meets an accomplished airman, Peter Gregory. The temporary nature
of life at wartime brings romance where she loses her virginity
and her heart. Peter is
sent on a mission over France and becomes missing in action. She joins a Special Operations
Executive (SOE) training course where about one third of the women sent to France never returned. The secret service exploit her talent to speak French fluently and she is happy to return to France where she spent much of her childhood. She passes interrogation to be a spy, has her hair and dentistry adapted to look more like a French woman and is parachuted into France to complete a specified
mission. She goes AWOL and sets out to
find Gregory.Wikipedia says:
"The character of Charlotte Gray was based on a New Zealand woman called Nancy Wake who worked with the French Resistance near a village called Verneix in the Auvergne region. Instead of escaping she became a courier for the resistance but had to eventually flee to Spain and then England where she was trained by the SOE. She was parachuted back into France on 29 April 1944 and went on to lead a 7,000 strong resistance group in the Auvergne region. Her husband, Henri Fioca, was tortured and killed by the Gestapo for failing to reveal her whereabouts."
I'll put this on my retirement list!
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