Loving the Alien

June 13, 2013 | By | 6 Replies More

I can still recall the precise moment when I first set foot on foreign soil. It was 9.15pm on Friday, 21st July, 1978 and I was thirteen years old, tall for my age and skinny, with a mane of dark hair that was always in my eyes. I had been invited to stay with some Belgian friends for an entire month to improve my French.

Author Helen Grant

Author Helen Grant

I stepped off the boat at Oostende with a sense of almost overwhelming excitement. Abroad at last. Instantly, everything was fascinating: the exotic new food (waffles); the multilingual posters and announcements; even the layout of the train that took us as far as Brussels (“there was a passage outside like the ones James Bond always manages to fight people in,” I observed excitedly in my travel diary).

It was the beginning of a lifelong, passionate and irrational love of all things foreign. I still have the diary from that trip; it is filled lovingly and undiscriminatingly with everything from postcards of Brussels and newspaper cuttings to cheese labels and plans of my hosts’ house.

That diary was followed by a series of others, increasingly nonchalant in tone and exotic in destination. The last one ended abruptly halfway through a tour of Iran, when I abandoned non-fiction for the more frivolous delight of writing comic verses about chadors. Writing and travel have, for me, always been inextricably entwined.

It is unsurprisingly, therefore, that my very first novel was set abroad. For a long time I had been thinking in a vague sort of way about writing a book; it was moving overseas – to live, not just to visit – that finally provided the inspiration and the opportunity.

In 2001 I was the stay-at-home mother of one tiny baby and a young toddler; if I had written anything at all it would probably have been the single word, “Help!” The previous Christmas, my husband had been offered a post in a factory in the Eifel, a rural area of Germany, so that summer the whole family decamped to the pretty little tourist town of Bad Münstereifel.

I was quite nervous about moving.  The children were tiny, we did not know a soul in the area, we only had one car (which my husband took to work with him every day), nobody in the family spoke German apart from me, and when we arrived we discovered that our flat (a new build) was not ready, so we spent three weeks in a hotel whilst they finished building it.

 Bad Münstereifel

Bad Münstereifel

In spite of this inauspicious start, I fell in love with Bad Münstereifel. Not only is it a very beautiful town, with its half timbered houses and cobbled streets, but it is also bursting with local history and legends. It has been raided several times by French troops; in the plague years it was temporarily abandoned and wild creatures ventured into the town centre itself, so that a hunter actually bagged a stag on the steps of the town hall; in the 1400s a flash flood filled up the mediaeval walls like a basin and drowned a lot of people and livestock.

It has an eternal huntsman, a headless ghost, a coven of witches disguised as enormous black cats and a Feuermännchen or “fiery man” who lives in a cave called the Devil’s Hole and whose touch can burn. Even better, it has the suave and dauntless folk hero “Unshockable Hans”, who has faced down most of the above apparitions without turning a hair.

Once my youngest had finally started at the local German kindergarten and I had the mornings to myself, I began writing in earnest. It was Unshockable Hans and the other legends of Bad Münstereifel that inspired my first book, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden.The book is set in Bad Münstereifel and concerns the attempts of ten-year-old Pia Kolvenbach and her friend Stefan to solve the mystery of a series of disappearances. Being youngsters, they are open to possibilities that adults would discount, and they use the legends of the town as the basis for their enquiries, thinking that something supernatural is afoot.

Helen Grant Silent Sunday

Cover of Helen Grant’s book Silent Saturday

The book was not just inspired by Bad Münstereifel; it is a love letter to a town I adored. It is no accident that Pia is the child of one German parent and one English parent, with the threat of having to move away from her home town always hanging over her. I shared her feelings. I am British by birth, but felt more at home in that little German town than I have ever been anywhere else. All through our years there I felt the threat of leaving hanging over me. When we finally did have to move, I was heartbroken; the day we left the town I was driven away in floods of tears.

Luckily for me, new adventures were in store. Rather than moving back to the UK, we moved to Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. My second novel set in Germany was being published during the move, and I wrote the third one in our first year in Flanders. After that I wiped away my tears and began to look around my new home with interested eyes. Soon I was hard at work on Silent Saturday, a novel set in Flanders. My Muse has a lot of stamps in her passport.

 

 

Helen Grant is the author of  four novels, her latest is Silent Saturday which came out April this year. She currently lives in Scotland with her Family.  Follow Helen on twitter @Helengrantsays or visit her website www.helengrantbooks.com

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Category: Being a Writer, Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing

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  1. Helen Grant says:

    I typed a lovely reply to the above earlier and it has somehow got lost before I posted it! Anyway, just wanted to say that I love to hear how different places have inspired other authors. Funny to think that my original homeland of England thrills other people as much as Germany and Belgium have thrilled me!

  2. I can really identify with your love of being somewhere new and looking at everything around you with fresh eyes to spark new writing. I agree that there is something deeply satisfying and exciting about the unfamiliar. Years ago, I spent a couple of years living and working in Granada, Southern Spain and completely fell in love with the place. I knew that I had to write a story or novel with Granada as the backdrop, and then once I started hearing taboo whispers about what had happened there during the Spanish civil war, I knew that this was my book.

    I’d never heard of it before, but I love the sound of Bad Münstereifel with all its cobbled streets, folklore and legends. Interesting too that you wrote your novel set there whilst actually there – I’ve always felt this is the right way to do things as then you’re on hand to speak to people there and do your research, but somehow I always seem to end up writing about a place several years after I’ve left, almost as though I need that long for my experiences to be filtered first before I can commit the ideas to paper. I moved with my family from London to Nairobi a couple of months ago and, similarly to you when you started work on ‘The Vanishing of Katharina Linden’, my three children are now all at school for the whole morning which means, for the first time ever, I have the whole morning to myself to write. I am polishing up my novel set in Granada during the Spanish civil war that I was inspired to write from my stint in Spain all those years ago. And who knows, perhaps the ‘Kenyan’ novel will be written a few years from now…or now with all this time, I can be inspired and encouraged to write it whilst still here, as I experience afresh the pulse and colour of Kenyan life unfolding around me.

  3. Jill Haugh says:

    What lovely insight into your life and work. Thanks for sharing. I have a prticular love of the Motherland–England, and I set my first novel there too.
    Best of luck,
    Just Jill

    • Helen Grant says:

      Thank you Jill! Funny – although I am English by birth, the only place I have rarely set any of my work has been England, and now I live in Scotland so when I have finally finished my Flemish trilogy I shall probably set a book here in Perthshire! Nice to think that England has inspired other writers just as Germany and Belgium have inspired me. xx

  4. Jill Haugh says:

    What a lovely insight into how your novel was written. I too have a love of all things foreign, especially the mother-land of England. I set my first novel there, too.
    Best of luck to you!
    ~Jus Jill

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