I'm currently working on a novel told in the alternating voices of a mother and daughter - Georgina and Eloisa. It's set in London and Paris.
Born in 1945, Georgina is the daughter of an American airman and an English librarian who dies when her daughter is only six. Her father remarries and Georgina comes to define herself largely in opposition to her well-meaning but limited step-family. Determined to see the world and become a writer, she goes to Paris - and doesn't get any further. It's 1968 and she falls in love with a half-French, half-Senegalese musician. In the middle of that year's 'revolution', Eloisa is conceived. For various reasons (connected with revelations about the family's possible collaboration with the Nazis) the father goes off to Senegal to find his family there - unaware that Georgina is pregnant - and simply 'disappears' . Georgina returns to London to become a single parent, still believing the man she loved will return. Trying to hang on to her dreams but having to compromise considerably, she battles to bring up her daughter with all the advantages (despite their relative poverty) she wishes she'd had herself.
But different generations have competing ideas about what they want of life, each generation on the sticky web of its own personal and collective history. The after-shocks of the Second World War reverberate throughout their story and help to shape it. In Thatcher's Britain and beyond, mother and daughter pursue their contrasting needs while trying to come to terms with the life that 'history' has dealt them, and each tries to shape the other to their own dreams - Eloisa wanting security and acceptance and the ideal father she never had (and when she meets Jack she thinks she's found him), Georgina desperate to recapture her time in Paris when she felt more alive and fulfilled than any time before or since. Neither quite understands the other, despite the love between them.
Uncovering the mystery of her father's disappearance, Eloisa is able to help free her mother from the past, and both achieve an unexpected 'accommodation' with life - and death - in their differing ways.
Here is the opening of the novel:
— GEORGINA —
My stepbrother Archie invited me into the cupboard under the stairs to ‘see some magic’. I didn’t know how I was expected to see it in the dark and I was afraid of the cupboard, anyway: I’d seen a large spider run down the hall and disappear under the door into it.
‘You’ll like the magic,’ he coaxed. ‘It’s really interesting.’
‘Can I come in, too?’ His younger brother, Sam, had a high, wheedling voice.
‘There’s not room for you,’ said Archie. ‘Georgie’s little. She can squeeze in.’
They were both ‘big boys’, fleshy and ungainly and often called names because of it. It was true: there wasn’t room for both of them in the cupboard.
Before I went in I tucked my trousers into my socks so no spiders could run up my legs.
Archie had a torch with a red light. He closed the door. I said I was scared. Archie put his arm around me. ‘You won’t be scared when the magic starts. And you must promise not to open the door once we begin. Do you promise?’
Feeling just a little bit scared was quite nice in an odd sort of way. So I promised.
‘Close your eyes.’
There were noises as if he was moving things about. It seemed ages. I cheated and opened one eye just a little bit. He was messing about with something, his back to me, the bulky shape of him seeming even bigger in the dim red light and the smallness of the cupboard.
‘Can I look yet?’
‘Not for a minute.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘I have to get it ready,’ he said. ‘Nearly there.’
There was a strange smell.
‘Right, now you can look. Watch carefully …’
On the floor, next to what looked like a machine of some sort, was a square white dish with smelly water in it. Using grey plastic tongs he slipped a rectangle of thickish white paper into the liquid.
‘This is when the magic happens.’ He put his arm around me again. His hand squeezed my shoulder and I could feel the fatness of him against me.
The white paper began to get patches of pale grey. Some of the pale grey darkened.
‘It’s like the magic painting book I used to have,’ I said. ‘You put water on it and the colours come. Except it’s not colours.’
‘It’s not water, it’s chemicals.’
‘What’s chemicals?’
‘Never mind. Just watch … Look! Who’s that?’
The patches of pale grey and dark grey and bits of black and bits of white were slowly making themselves into a person.
ME!
I was holding my big doll by the hand, making her ‘walk’. We were in the garden.
The moment it was just dark enough to be clear, Archie pulled the photo out and slipped it into another square white dish of liquid.
‘That’s the fixer,’ he said. ‘That will stop you going too dark.’
The doll’s name was Margaret: a ‘walkie-talkie’ doll, as they were called, though she didn’t really talk – just made a moaning kind of sound when you tipped her backwards and forwards. But she could do a stiff-legged walk if you held her and propelled her in the right way, her head moving from side to side in tandem with a slow, clunking goose-step.
It made me cross when people called her my ‘baby’. Babies don’t walk. And I wasn’t in the least maternal, anyway. Margaret was my friend, listening to my stories when nobody else had time.
They were mostly stories about America, embroidered around facts and anecdotes I’d heard from my father, Lieutenant Miles Hardiman Jnr, very smart and serious in the one picture there was of him in his USAF uniform.
War was very, very bad, he said: lots of people got hurt. ‘Though if it hadn’t been for that nasty old Mr Hitler, honey, you wouldn’t be here. I’d never have come to England and met your sweet, sweet mother. So I guess a tiny little bit of something good can be got out of even the worst situations, if we try, eh, Georgie?’