Inspired by a true story, American Bombshell is a tale of love, risk and coming of age during the final convulsions of World War Two.
Mark Twain’s famous dictum to ‘write what you know’ may just be one of the worst pieces of advice ever given to a writer of fiction, if my experience with my first novel is anything to go by. Yet I could hardly ignore my mother’s extraordinary life-story – an orphanage upbringing during a world war, a wedding at seventeen to an American B17 pilot and crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Mary was impressive enough, never mind that once in the States she married twice more, mixed with movie B-listers in Hollywood and worked on JFK’s election campaign.
Then there were the discoveries I made myself rooting about the house, a ration book, an American Green Card, a pack of Empire State matches and a mink coat among them. There was an album too; packed with gleaming Cadillacs and glittering Hollywood parties where celebrities posed, fresh-faced boys gathered beneath the wings of a B17, and Kennedy gazed out in blurry black and white. It was from these as well as mum’s stories and my own imagination, that the story of an English girl jitterbugging with the Yanks, drinking rum and Coca Cola and experimenting with love, was crafted.
But the advantage of a ‘shake-and-bake’ novel came with a catch, as I found when I began the manuscript. Trawling the depths of memory raised more than treasure, dragging up along with it the ghosts of childhood fear, neglect and abuse. Mum’s journey through life had indeed gifted me a great tale, but the process of living it had wreaked havoc on her personality, in turn transforming my own childhood into a living hell which left me with episodic anxiety and depression.
Mother could be playful, witty and creative. She had a sharp sense of humour, which I guess she passed on, along with a love of books and stories. Thanks to her I was reading long before I’d gone anywhere near a school. Yet she had multiple personalities daily and you never knew who you’d get. It might start with one of the movie lines she was adept at remembering, like this one by Groucho Marks; ‘This morning I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. How he got into my Pyjamas I’ll never know.’ But it could also end with her screaming the house down and pulverising the china. She earned her childhood nickname of ‘Beryl the Peril,’ by being as any man have told you, ‘a bit of a handful.’ As my father himself said;
‘Son, if they’d dropped that woman on Berlin in 1939, there’d have been no war. Any bunch of fools can survive an atom bomb, but absolutely no-one survives a Beryl’.
As I sat on my bed contemplating a bottle of Aspirin at the age of thirteen, I reflected that he could be right. Repeated up-rootings, including ten schools and apparently random periods in children’s homes when she went off on her various ‘liaisons,’ left me an anxious and confused adolescent. Our rudderless odyssey began when, at the age of four I was asked who I wanted to live with, mum or dad? Five minutes later a small child was walking away, dragging an suitcase beside an incandescent mother. We travelled, staying for a while in my actor-cum-antiques-dealer uncle’s flat overlooking the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden – a rendezvous for actors and artists, who’d visit accompanied by sweet-smelling smoke, the chink of glasses and badly played guitars. But life wasn’t rosy. We stole from tips and begged for veg from the market because mum couldn’t hold down a job, and without a bit of Faginism we’d have gone hungry.
Eventually my father found me and funded spells in boarding schools, where despite bullying, there was at least food, and order. This was just as well, for the men my mother hitched up with included the devout Catholic who, before he took to shooting up the kitchen with a revolver – the final impetus for mum to leave him – seemed to have as his modus vivendi the repeating pattern of drink, wife beat, confess, repeat. I did not witness this, thank God, but the mental effects of the instability exploded like a delayed action bomb when I was a young adult in anxiety, panic attacks and OCD. I’d loved my mother uncritically as a child, but the same person who’d given me a restless imagination and a story to tell had along the way wrecked my peace of mind.
Many time I thought of writing Mum’s story, but each time I delayed. It was just too painful. It took several rounds of therapy, three decades of forgetting and anti-depressants before I had the courage. The opportunity was provided by Brexit (which exasperated me so much I left the UK and found peace a quiet on Kerry’s Wild West Coast) and by Covid, which provided the paid time off needed to be able to risk a literary career.
But it’s done now. American Bombshell was launched in March and I’m writing my second, which has absolutely nothing to do with my mother. American Bombshell focusses on the early, bright period of mums life, and while it contains the violence of war, is an upbeat, hopeful tale, of character, luck in trumping ill-fortune and success in finding love. In the latter respect in particular it’s fictionalised, an attempt to bringing good from bad, and a therapeutic effort of my own to find peace. The book itself, like many first novels, is imperfect, but, as Alvy Singer, Woody Allen’s character in Annie Hall says;
‘What do you want? It was my first play. You know how you’re always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because it’s real difficult in life.’
From my limited experience to date, I would have to agree.
About American Bombshell:
Inspired by a true story, American Bombshell is a tale of love, risk and coming of age during the final convulsions of World War Two.
Incarcerated in an abusive orphanage by an unstable and vengeful mother, seventeen-year-old Rosie Haskell is released in February 1944 to survive in an adult world.
She finds a job at a wartime radio factory. At a dance she meets Eugene, a glamorous Irish-American pilot, a dash of Hollywood in a drab English town. Despite appearances, Eugene is falling apart from the constant stress of flying his B17 bomber over Germany and the huge burden of keeping his crew alive.
As Rosie tiptoes around physical intimacy with Eugene, Hazel, a tough attractive Yorkshire woman, enters the picture. Rosie, caught at a vulnerable moment, is seduced by her in what is her first sexual experience.
In the summer of 1944, as D-Day and the invasion of Europe draw closer, Rosie tries to make sense of her feelings and steer her own course.
While Eugene and his crew struggle to survive their missions over Germany, Rosie must grow up fast, dodging Hitler’s flying bombs and mustering all her wits to find the true love and stability she needs.
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