North Sea Passage and the Women of Spirit

Ted had a Fabian personality. He was a man of peace. He could cheat people with words. He stood up in the House and tucked his chin into his Adam’s apple. They all did that. They looked like little Jack Horners. They had been at debating society all their lives. They spoke for decency and realism in a world that had changed. The British people had harmless eccentricities and waved the Union Jack.

Ten years after her book, in 2006, she felt unwell and went for an X-ray which showed her lungs peppered with little dots. She deteriorated rapidly, first in hospital, then in a hospice. She was on morphia for bone pain. Etienne thought of her dynamic little frame wasting and shrivelling, her auburn waves peeping over the top of the eiderdown like when she was a little girl. She hadn’t really started and now she was leaving, going back to her Maker from where he had sent her.

This is a story like a novel, of two generations of a fugitive family who land at Harwich in 1939. There are backward glances through Germany and Poland to the mid-nineteenth century, and it ends in the present day. The actions take place in the villages of old Poland, Nazi Berlin, wartime London and seaside towns, in school and the sports-field, in the Paris of 1945, on Alpine glaciers, amongst rising stars of British politics...

It has two main threads – the mind of Etienne, and the characters of the mother, the sister and later of the Cabinet Minister who was a leading persuader in the formation of the party that was to re-shape British politics and was its Leader in the Lords. The sister was ‘the nearest thing the Left had to a political hostess’. Theme might be said to be corruption of character associated with idealistic politics; even more portentously, the pre-Socratic mind of Etienne through whom the action is seen – overwhelmed by his present experiences and historical daydreams, retarded in rationality, unable to speak, his mind a disorder of mists and his values dark – un-English, unmodern.

North Sea Passage and the Women of Spirit is a memoir but written in the style of literary novel and will appeal to readers of that genre, as well as of biography and modern history.

A note from André Schulman: "It is only now, in February 2013, that I look myself up on the Web and there for all to see is a letter I wrote to the British Medical Journal 29 years ago! Everything there may not have been entirely unwarranted but it does show a large measure of insensitivity, gullibility and plain stupidity that makes me cringe, as well as being atrociously written in my attempt at 'serious university language'. I've not looked up the letters referred to or the rest of the correspondence in the BMJ. I have no doubt they would give me further cause to cringe. I apologize. It's an example of my retarded growing up, as of Etienne Epstein's."