Reading and Writing: Tying Down the Lion

I'm so delighted to welcome lovely, talented author Joanna Campbell to the Reading and Writing blog today. Joanna has been an online friend for many years and I’ve loved so many of her vast number of published short stories that I knew it was only a matter of time until her début novel would be available. Tying Down the Lion is a treat I am looking forward to reading in paperback and Joanna kindly wrote this very interesting post, exploring some of the themes in the novel such as the Kindertransport.

Welcome, Joanna, and thank you for being my guest today and for writing such an emotive post. I wish you every success with all your writing.

Tying Down the Lion

It is the summer of 1967 and the Bishop family are departing their house in Britain for a continental road trip. Their destination: Berlin, the gritty city recovering from the bombs of 1939—45 and now sliced in two by the Cold War. Will the journey unite the Anglo-German family, or forever rip them apart?

Not only does Grandma Nell loathe foreigners—especially Bridget, her German daughter-in-law—she is none too pleased about son Roy jamming the whole family into his aging Morris Traveller car for the duration. Granddaughter Jacqueline observes the trip—and the resultant spillage of family secrets—with a keen eye, wry sense of humour and a notepad in which to pen it all.

This is a story of ordinary people in an extraordinary situation, and the discovery of how something divided can be more revealing than a perfect whole. It is a quest for a family who build walls in their minds as they try to discover who they are and where they belong.

Tying Down the Lion is available in paperback and as an e-book from Amazon UK and Amazon US

Kindertransport

Tying Down The Lion is a novel about how people rediscover or recreate their homes after being uprooted, and this theme reflects the Nazi persecution of the Jews and their subsequent suffering and displacement.

In November 1938, a brutal signpost appeared on the path that led to the outbreak of World War II. In one terrible night, the Nazis methodically destroyed and plundered Jewish homes, synagogues and businesses. It came to be known as Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass, the name arising from the shards and splinters of the smashed windows that covered the streets. Likewise, the future for the Jewish community in Germany lay in ruins.

The following month, a rescue mission—the Kindertransport—was set in motion. It would eventually transport ten thousand children, mostly Jewish, from Germany, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia to live with foster families in Great Britain. The picture shows the first refugees arriving in Harwich.

In Tying Down The Lion, English narrator, Jacqueline, visits Berlin nearly thirty years after the shattering event that triggered this mass evacuation. She stands in the magnificent, domed Friedrichstrasse railway station where so many bewildered children waited for the train that would take them away from home to begin their lives all over again in a strange country.

Each one carried a small suitcase and wore a manila label around their necks. Armed guards checked their passports, in which the Jewish ‘Sara’ or ‘Israel’ had to be added alongside their own names, so that the Reich ministry could easily identify the Jews. There was also the chilling rubber-stamped word—‘stateless’.

Britain was on the verge of war, but could at least keep these disorientated children safe from tyranny and torture. However, the impending danger in their homeland meant little to the youngest waiting in the queue at the station in Berlin, watching their mothers wave handkerchiefs in farewell. All they knew was the confusion of being wrenched from everything that was trusted and familiar, and from everyone they loved.

Jacqueline contemplates the emotions of the children who left Berlin. Some were orphans with no one to wish them well, whereas those with parents were allowed only to wave goodbye. As they prepared to leave, the Nazis did not permit either adults or children to cry.

Which, Jacqueline wonders, was worse—being taken from your mother, or embarking alone on a journey to the unknown without anyone to see you on your way? Some must have looked out of the train window at their mothers, eyes welling with forbidden tears, while others simply stared ahead, listening to the rumble of the wheels on the track.

Jacqueline, who has a small brother, Victor, imagines a little boy’s mother leaving the station and returning home alone, knowing her child’s life would be spared, but, almost certainly, not her own—the majority of the Kinder never saw their parents again.

After walking out of the station into the sun, she would listen for the last vibration on the track to settle before her smile disappears and she dares to cry. She would hesitate before turning away, scared to go home and see his clockwork train at a standstill, his ranks of cowboys and Indians waiting for him. Her own torture and death lie ahead and the only comfort is that he might soon be home, wherever that will be.

Reading memoirs of those who were part of the Kindertransport, it is striking that some cannot recall the moment of departure, as if a veil had to be drawn across a memory too painful to keep.

After arriving, exhausted and homesick, in a strange land, and having to learn different customs and a foreign language, new roots had to be put down in order to survive and prosper—a mammoth task for an adult, but for a child torn from their homeland, an overwhelming task. Yet for so many of the Kinder, Britain became—and remained—home, both in a practical sense and also within their hearts.

As a way of understanding the theme of home, Jacqueline studies the way spiders repair their webs.

If a spider’s web is broken, the spider starts spinning again straightaway. The silk thread keeps unravelling. The work never ends until the spider dies. He rebuilds anywhere he can, throwing out the dragline to get the work underway for the millionth time.

Finally, there are no more appropriate words than those of German novelist, Hermann Hesse, to capture the theme of home within Tying Down The Lion:

Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

***

Thank you so much, Rosemary, for giving me this opportunity to write a guest post, and also for advising me last year to send my novel to the smaller, independent publishers. Brick Lane were the first I tried and, not only did they offer to publish Tying Down The Lion within three weeks of my initial enquiry, they are also wonderful to work with and have made the entire publishing process a great pleasure.

I’m so thrilled for you, Joanna, as you deserve great success!

About Joanna

I began writing in 2008 and my short stories have appeared in numerous publications, including literary and women’s magazines, as well as anthologies. I was delighted to win the Exeter Writers short story competition in 2011 and the Bath Short Story Award’s local prize in 2013.

I write full-time in an old cottage in the Cotswolds while my husband runs his IT consultancy on the other side of the wall. I am supposed to be his secretary, but he can sometimes wait all day for his coffee and has to answer his own calls.

Although I still write short fiction—my collection, When Planets Slip Their Tracks, is being published by Ink Tears Press later in the year—I am enjoying the departure into novel-writing.

I used to teach German and took my degree at Exeter University, living in Germany for a year as part of the course. The scarred city of Berlin inspired me to write Tying Down The Lion and I was thrilled when Brick Lane offered me a publishing contract.

Tying Down The Lion began as a 1,000-word piece that made its way into the shortlists of several competitions. The central characters refused to leave my imagination until I had written another 99,000 words of their story.

You can connect with Joanna on her website, Facebook or Twitter

There is an advance review of Tying Down The Lion on novelist Rachel Connor’s website.