Margaret Leaving by Rosemary Hayward
available at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Margaret Leaving
'A gripping historical mystery'
When her stepmother, Margaret, suddenly leaves home, seventeen-year-old Jenny North does everything in her power to keep her own life on track, even if that means leaving her home and her father. But as time passes Jenny's need to understand why Margaret walked out on her family becomes ever stronger.
Family secrets, hidden love and some lesser known events of the second world war intertwine in this twentieth century family saga set in Maidenhead, Oxford and Paris.
photo by Simon Hayward
The clock was chiming again and she tried to focus on it. She loved the clock. But now she was hearing Margaret saying, as she so often did: that clock, only the half hour chime is ever satisfactory. It stops the quarter hour too soon, and the three quarter hour is all too much effort for it.
A haywain, drawn by a sturdy big-footed farm horse, was positioned under a magnificent old tree, on a single-track lane that cut across an open field. A wooden hay rake lay on the ground, tines down. The haywain had pneumatic tyres, she noticed, otherwise all the farm tools were the same as they would have been when Constable was painting idyllic country scenes. The second world war effort on the home front had been unmechanised and labour intensive, at least in this picture. Two women with pitchforks were loading the cart with hay; one by the side of the track, one on top of the growing load. A third sat on the back of the horse, whose white nose was down on the ground, presumably seeking tender shoots to eat, while a fourth woman was tugging on his bridle.
​ “Warm honey stone against bright blue summer sky, heavy arches for dark doors, lumpy cobblestones crossed over with flagstone walkways, the bright green circle of grass around the mathematical perfection of a domed building. It’s so completely non-twentieth-century. There is nothing ugly in it at all.”​
photo by John-Jo Hayward
photo by Rosemary Hayward
She walked out of her study and into the garden. She loved her back garden. It captured the afternoon sun in the summer. And she had planted roses: Peace, for her father. They were well suited to the Oxford clay.
Out on the lawn, Emily was taking her after lunch nap, lying on her back on her new blue, padded, reclining chair, shaded by a matching blue parasol. A paperback Dick Francis rose and fell on her chest.
Jenny sat on the grass and imagined herself lecturing to garden clubs, not undergraduates.
“Peace, this famous rose, was conceived in 1935, a scion of the house of Meilland.”​​
THE STORY BEHIND MARGARET
Warning
Contains Spoilers
​​In 1971, Michael Elkins, an American journalist and the BBC’s correspondent in Jerusalem, published Forged in Fury, first in the US and later in the UK. Forged in Fury is not an easy book to read and when first published caused considerable controversy. In it Elkins revealed the existence of DIN, a secretive group of post second world war Jews sworn to take revenge on Nazis.
In Margaret Leaving I place Margaret at the center of one of the events Elkins describes as being orchestrated by DIN, the kidnapping and assassination of SS Obersturmführer Konrad Schumann.​ Elkins was a member of the blandly named Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor of the CIA, that operated in Germany immediately after World War Two. This is where Elkins must have acquired some of the information relayed in Forged in Fury. Later, in a kibbutz in Galilee, he met Malachi Wald, the founder of DIN. Wald persuaded Elkins to write about what he knew of the Jewish resistance and the revenge missions carried out in the years following Germany’s defeat.
It has been intimated that Elkins was even more closely connected with DIN than his well-documented involvement with the OSS. The Sam Bourne book, The Final Reckoning, also tells the story of the Jewish avengers. As a work of fiction, ​Margaret Leaving is more concerned with the way our perception of history changes than with the action, thriller approach of The Final Reckoning or the journalistic reporting of Forged in Fury.
History appears to shimmer and change, depending on where you are standing. It is incomplete and tantalizing and yet supremely important, because our history is our culture. It’s who we are. And also it’s not who we are, because we are newly created. History is murky and that is exactly the sort of murkiness I needed for my plot, a mystery to be contemplated if not solved.