Rosemary Bailey is, on her own assessment. an emotional writer.
When I interviewed her for The National - the piece has been published today at this link - she told me she had wept as she wrote her new book, Love and War in the Pyrenees: A Story of Courage, Fear and Hope 1939-1944*.
In previous books, she wrote about her own life in the Pyrenees, where she worked on the restoration of a monastery, and her brother's death from Aids, written with his blessing after he became ill, which describes the support he received in the Yorkshire mining community he served as an Anglican priest.
I have read neither of those, but found her tale of the Pyrenees in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and during the collaborationist years of the Second World War, impossible to put down.
The subject matter is one I find fascinating in any case, but Rosemary sheds new light on each of the tragedies of the era: the Spanish retirada, or flight of refugees from the evil Franco; their detention in ghastly conditions in what the French actually called concentration camps, admittedly before the term came to mean something even more sinister; and the mixture of courage and cowardice, survival and death, love and hate that she uncovered during laborious research for her book.
The theme was of special interest to me because of my theory, already explored here in my articles headed the Fall of London (1) and the Fall of London (2), about what might have happened in the UK had the Nazis invaded. In short, I believe there would have been wholesale collaboration, as well as resistance, and that the resistance would have come, as in France, principally from the Left.
In researching the book, Bailey read a vast amount of literature, and ploughed through hitherto unpublished files, as well as tracking down a wide range of people who lived through the events she describes.
She spoke to people who had fled from the tyranny of Franco, Jewish victims of the Nazis, or their descendants, people who were involved in the Resistance, people who understood why collaborators acted as they did. She also had a file of love letters from a wartime romance and these reveal more about the attitudes and dilemmas of the time.
She also read Irène Némirovsky's outstandingly good Suite Française, a gripping novel fictionalised (factionalised?) account of the Fall of Paris written shortly before the author was arrested and bundled off to Auschwitz, where she soon died in a typhus outbreak.
The manuscripts remained unpublished for more than 60 years. I read part of the book in French after interviewing Némirovsky's surviving daughter, who had worked on turning her mother's work into the novel she intended, in Paris in 2004. I did not complete it until this year, cheating with the English translation.
It was the first book that Bailey had read in French, and she found it immensely moving. I certainly found it moving in English (and the section I had read in French was especially so: a full account of all the efforts to save Nemirovsky from the clutches of the Nazis, most of those efforts inspired by her husband, whose failure to save her was followed by his own deportation, and death, in Auschwitz).
If I have tempted anyone to buy any of the books mentioned here, they may be purchased at cut prices from the Amazon site, reached via any link in the Salut! bookshelf in the righthand sidebar.
* Rosemary Bailey'a new book is published in the UK by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
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