Andy my canine boss

Since we got married dogs have always had a special place in my life.  First we lived in a caravan 7’6”x 22’ not big but we were young, in love and needed to be together. But it wasn’t long before we wanted a dog, husband Mike’s parents had always had one and I had always wanted one. Fairly soon we had a near Labrador/gundog not that we wanted a gundog but we were poor and ‘Andy’ was cheap. He was naturally wilful and full of testosterone and we had little idea how to train him but unaware of our ignorance at the time. An added complication was that Mike was in the Air Force which meant we eventually moved into married quarters where all the other dogs seemed to be bitches but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The caravan (trailer) was pitched in an open farmer’s field where Andy could exercise himself; in our ignorance we used to just let him out of the caravan and he would bark some time later to be let in. Naturally he completely failed to understand the situation when he was put on a lead for a formal walk and when we let him off would fail to come near enough to be put back on his lead when called.  Our attempt at training him out of this embarrasment came too late, the strategy was to tempt him near enough with a biscuit (cookie) to catch him. However he developed a technique of taking the biscuit when my arm was at full stretch and would be away again before I could lay a finger on him. We lived by the side of a disused airfield and my father once walked round it twice getting through a large pack of digestives on the way before arriving back at the caravan by himself. Andy followed in a few minutes later much entertained by the exercise.

By the time we had moved to the official park on the base we had bought a bigger caravan 7’6”x32’ and had a baby daughter. The need for baby sitters led to a new situation, a delightful girl was the first of these volunteers before we left we were relieved to find Andy found her quite acceptable. After our evening out we found our baby sitter stood in the middle of the lounge. It appears after we had left Andy had decided that where ever she sat was just the spot for him and had got on the seat behind her and edged her off. He repeated this no matter where she sat until she gave up and had stood for the whole evening. Later to foil his attempts at dislodging baby sitters we used to suggest that they lay on our bed next to our daughter’s cot and keep the door closed. Naturally this reduced the volunteers and raised the pay rate.

As I inferred at the beginning Andy was a very badly behaved dog, our fault I freely admit but then we paid for our failure. When we went to bed Andy would wait till we were asleep then creep up between us and go to sleep, he never woke us by getting in  but in the morning there he would be with his head on the pillow. When we changed the caravans we had to move all our stuff out of the old one while they sited the bigger one, during this manoeuvre we tied Andy to a tree by the clothes line. There must have been about 25 to 30 feet of line naturally Andy thought he was free and ran off at top speed accelerating until the line which was slightly elastic stretched to its limit and snapped back flinging him into the air. He was most surprised and unhappy by this performance, returned to the tree and barked for the rest of the afternoon.

As he got older he quietened down only his attention to bitches remained. Much to our embarrassment he would disappear and an irate neighbour would come round and complain that our dog was lying on his front door step or trying to get in their back door. Eventually Mike was posted to Germany and his parents offered to look after Andy for us. I wonder if they really knew what they were taking on.

So why am I writing about our dogs? Well my new book, being written at the moment, will be about my Newfoundland dogs and I thought it would be fun to trace my life experiences leading up to our ownership of these well behaved (trained) monsters. Nice monsters though.

 

Unwanted childern can suceed

No two people are the same and I guess much of it is the way they’re brought up. Someone once said something like give me a child till he’s four and I will change it for life, whether this is true or not, I can’t say. But what of the unwanted child who is ignored or little influenced by their parents. It seemed to me that they might be doomed to live an unhappy and disappointing life and yet there may be exceptions. Fran Grainger was an exception. Normally I base my characters on people I have known or an amalgam of people who have faced the problems in the story, here again Fran Grainger is the exception.

I was brought up in a seaside town full of hotels and visitors, later on when I was married my husband and I nearly bought a hotel. In preparation for the purchase I attended a catering and hotel management course. It was these two facts together with the thoughts I had of a successful unwanted child that lead me to write ‘Evergreen Girl’. Fran, our heroine, is close only to her older sister but unsupported by her parents, thrown out of her home in her teenage years she develops a desire to improve herself. She changes from a rather weak uninteresting person to a hardnosed business icon both through luck and her work ethic.

That in essence is the story, of course there are many junctions where the wrong choice or reaction could have lead to an entirely different life for her. The development of her character is shown through the situations thrown at her, for example when she had an abortion it was because of her desire to progress in her career, rather than be held back by motherhood that gradually harden her soul. It is situations like this that occur throughout her young life which lead her to become aware of the worlds cruelties and further alienate her from her mother. Finally  she reaches the top of her business career only to fall in love with a farmer. However he has Victorian ideas of courting and made him initially reject her as she had more money than he had. His belief was that a man should be the sole support of his wife a new challenge over which Fran had to succeed. This is a most interesting problem for a woman with her experience and background to solve.

 Naturally as her creator I had to have a happy ending and in doing so compromised myself into writing another book in which a more rural life followed but being the person she had become it soon developed into a major business concern. This in turn lead to another book and finally ended up as Evergreen trilogy.

Grooming mature women

There’s been quite a lot recently about the noxious activity of grooming girls for sex and men’s exploitation. Interestingly enough it always seems to be the girls from care homes or less fortunate of our society. This set me wondering if it were possible that a married intelligent girl could be groomed. I had witnessed enough women in the thirty to forty age group making fools of themselves when I worked in industry to know that it was quite possible. I guess there comes a time in many women’s lives when their situation has become humdrum, even boring, at times like this the chance of a little secret excitement can be overwhelmingly attractive. It’ll be fun and no one need know, at least that’s how it starts this either leads to disappointment or further involvement.

It would be in the latter case that grooming could take place as an illicit relationship grows from “I can handle this” to “I never want this to end” the dependence on the relationship grows to the point when it can be a secret no longer. Whilst this is the woman’s case it may not be so from the man’s perspective, men in general do not place the same importance on a sexual relationship. This of course can lead to the woman being used, especially if there is a reason for the man to use her. In this situation it takes very little imagination to see how this can lead to the grooming of bored but mature rational women.

It was these thought that lead to the writing of ‘Seducing Judi’, Judi was a bright married secretary with Irish ancestry who with a little encouragement from him and against her better judgement fell for a junior manager it the factory. Naturally he was flattered and took advantage of what was offered but unknown to either of them he was mentally damaged from the effect of fighting the IRA in Ireland. As their relationship developed so did his erratic behaviour.

The sex in the book is not explicit, it is rather suggested not always by inference but I take the view that imagination is far more powerful than anything I could write. Anyone who has had an adequate sex life should be able to interpret in their own mind what’s happening even if they have to exaggerate a little. I do like to have a reason for writing a book, so this as well as a warning to the naive is a comment on the treatment or lack of it of ex-soldiers in the past.

 

Oh dear! My first cockup

Oh dear! I tried to simplify the appearance of the blog and I like it better now, but in so doing I lost my first post  ‘Dipping my toe etc’ it was a sort of introductory piece and now I can’t find it  – ANYWHERE.  So I’ve pinched a bit I did to start my blog on Goodreads.

Let me introduce myself

I actually hate writing about myself, I suppose it's because I was brought up to be modest in an almost self denigrating way such were the ideals of my mother. My father left my upbringing to her and she was my biggest influence. At nineteen I escaped into a fortunate marriage, fortunate because against the odds it worked, lasted and opened my horizons. Since then I have lived over most of the UK, Germany, France and Saudi Arabia it all depended on where my husband Mike was working. Do not imagine for one minute that I was the obedient wife dragged from pillar to post. I was and am an equal partner in our marriage not working but enjoying the experience of living where ever we were.
This is where the inspiration for my books developed, from the places we lived and the people we met. I would not claim that any of my characters are facsimiles of people we knew rather they are an amalgam of many but typical of the area from which they are drawn.

So far I have written five books the fifth about to be published as the last book in a trilogy call the Evergreen series which follows the life of an unwanted child from birth to retirement. After living with her through three books I just couldn't end the last book with her death.

The second book I wrote 'Seducing Judi' followed the fall of a married young woman of Irish extraction seduced by an ex-soldier with brain damage. He becomes obsessed with making her suffer for all the wrongs he believes he suffered in Ireland at the hands of the IRA.

My first book was written in Saudi Arabia and is a romance of the Romeo and Juliet genre called 'Inshallah'. A Saudi girl and an English boy fall in love across the divide of their cultural and religious differences which lead to extreme situations when their romance is discovered by her brother. For anyone who knows the Saudi culture will realize the danger that this situation put the girl in.

Perhaps in a later blog we will investigate these books further. For now I will close as this is my first blog with the hope you enjoyed it and will come back again.

Sojourn in Saudi

The Middle East certainly seems to be in a hell of a mess these days, some of you may know that I lived there and became involved with some of the locals there. Mind you it was a long time ago, back in the seventies and eighties, I just wonder how different it is now. Back then in Saudi Arabia there was a certain arrogance by the Arabs stemming from, I would guess, a rich new nation trying to establish itself in the world. Not many expatriates at the time liked it but it was a way of earning a larger than usual wage packet. This meant that the expatriates no matter what their nationality tended to form a closed community mixing only with their own except during working hours.  Of course this lead to a distorted view of the Arab nation by the expatriate, a lack of understanding of how a land made up largely at the time of rural folk and wandering tribes could enter the twentieth century.

King Fisal and the elders of Saudi made the courage’s decision to invite foreign expatriates in to teach, by on the job training, their nationals to embrace the technology of the west. Boys who were shepherds were given a course in their trainers language which they picked up with various levels of success. There were a few problems where American English was taught and a spanner became a wrench, so that an English trainer found an additional difficulty. This could lead to a wrong assessment of the trainees intelligence. Small things could rankle a trainer Saudis never used the phrases “please and thank you” but then they didn’t to each other so they didn’t appreciate these niceties. Religion was another area of misunderstanding the Koran lays down fairly definite rules for Muslims (and all Saudis are Muslims) some of which conflict with western ideas, this is not to say the west is right but it is an area wide open to badly made judgements.

In all at the time I was there, there were plenty of areas open to lack of understanding on both sides. Personally I got on well with the Saudis though it was difficult as a woman being only able to meet them through my husband, also their women had little understanding of English and I knew very little Arabic. But friends learn to understand each other and if there was a problem we would haul one of the men in to interpret. Yes generally the women and men were separated unless you were accepted as part of the family which I’m happy to say in most cases I was. It was such an enjoyable experience getting to know the Saudis both personally and through my husband that I began to feel unhappy at this gulf in understanding between the expatriate and their Saudi counterparts. So I wrote a novel to try to explain, in fictional form, each sides cultural values. It is a love story that tries to explain the Saudi domestic way of life in a way acceptable to the West.

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