Miracle Drug

Alexander on his way to Kanchenjunga

I was asked to do a live radio interview a while back. It was a Sunday morning programme where the guest picks a few pieces of music to discuss, and the chat starts with the reasons each are important and wanders on to the memories they evoke.  I found it surprisingly hard to come up with three songs that define my life. I thought of Brick in the Wall, as a comment on my struggle at school because of my dyslexia, and it is of course by a local Cambridge band.

Bridge over Troubled Water was another classic that got me thinking of the stilling influences of the quiet people who are most important to me, but also it had me recalling some of the scary bridges we navigated in Nepal. Some were so rotten or flimsy, we were never confident we’d all get across safely.

I was also thought of using U2’s

“I want a trip inside your head
Spend the day there...
To hear the things you haven't said
And see what you might see

I wanna hear you when you call
Do you feel anything at all?
I wanna see your thoughts take shape
And walk right out....”

This seemed to say so much and was so very poignant to me, because of my experiences in trying to contact my baby. But before I settled on this choice, I thought I’d better check on the lyrics. I was surprised to discover that the song I’d heard as Miracle Child, was actually Miracle Drug. So this wasn’t an innocent song about a parent’s love and contacting a troubled child, but a description of someone tripping on illegal substances.

David trekking in A Glimpse of Eternal Snows

THEN I strayed across a YouTube clip of Bono talking about the song and its inspiration. He explained that all the band members attended the same comprehensive school and a child called Christopher Nolan joined their class. Christopher’s body and his brilliant brain was locked in by severe cerebral palsy; he could hardly move. But then he was given a drug that relaxed just a little of the tension in his muscles. This enabled him to start typing by way of a 'unicorn' stick attached to his forehead. And so he wrote The Dam-burst of Dreams – his first book – at the age of 15.

“The songs are in your eyes
I see them when you smile...”

Nolan's book is a miraculous outpouring of all the creativity that was bottled up inside his wonderful mind for his entire childhood.

So there it was: the song that had spoken to me so powerfully was indeed about a mother’s love for a difficult-to-contact child. I didn’t discover this until after the interview though. Instead of Miracle Drug, so ended up choosing something ‘safer’: a piece of Nepali folk music, and I was probably the only person to enjoy its unusual chords and unpredictable rhythms that Sunday morning.

Civilisation

"I looked out from our flat roof on an alien scene. Someone blew on a conch. I took in the big sky of the plains. Beyond our house there was a lovely patchwork of bright yellow mustard and lush winter wheat. The colours were sharp and astonishingly crisp. I could have been at home in England hemmed in with grey drizzle, or brushing past people cocooned by stress and self-absorption. I thought of the life I’d led, commuting with my brain switched off, ignoring the world: cars and personal stereos keep reality out.

A cock crowed and received several answers. I started to see again: people herded cattle out to graze or took flowers to the temple; there were soft groans of buffalo- or ox-cart wheels as men moved rice, brought timber or thatch. Tharu women wearing bright blues and orange walked elegantly erect with water in pots or piles of firewood on their heads. Tinselly Badi women dressed in pink and purple swept out their shacks after the night’s lucrative work...."

From page 109 of A Glimpse of Eternal Snows

My redrawing of Tharu house decoration, Rajapur Island, Nepal

 

 

A peacock redrawn from a Tharu house, West Nepal

Leech attack

I've been talking today to intrepid development engineers on the subject of staying healthy abroad, and they've been encouraging me to tell stories. I was reminded of this one.

 

A leech was feeding on my leg in Nepal. It was during the monsoon when there are lots about. There is something utterly revolting about watching a slimy black parasite bloat up on your life-blookd but I didn't want to just rip it off. That can leave mouthparts behind and promote infection.

 

I walked up to a woman who was squatting by the path smoking. I asked in my best Nepali, ‘Please may I use your cigarette to get this leech off.’

‘You have a leech,’ the woman said, looking in pity at this numbskull.

‘Yes, and I want to get it off by burning it with your cigarette’

‘Don’t be daft,' she said, ripping it off my leg and cackling.

She must have had some skill, though, because she didn’t leave the mouthparts behind. I just had to walk home with blood dribbling down my leg - because of the anticoagulant. Most unattractive.



An unfed leech

 

 

 

Home help

 

I've spent the weekend with a lovely lot of children's authors - at a conference in Reading University. We talked of books and writing and entertained each other. Our poor beleaguered publishers are having to be more and more careful about money, and can't spend huge sums on so-called mid-list authors. The consensus was that we writers must make more of an effort to engage with our readers. With that in mind - and with the help of my techie son - we've filmed a snippet read from my about-to-be-launched travel memoir; this extract is about the challenges of finding home help. If you like it you'll find two more readings from A Glimpse of Eternal Snows on YouTube.

The Power of Words

I’d perhaps almost forgotten just how powerful words can be, but I had a reminder at the end of last month. I was invited by a good friend to give a talk in the fine market town of Hadleigh in Suffolk. The subject was the Crocodile Caves expeditions to Madagascar. It is quite a while since I revisited those experiences, and this time thought I’d read a couple of snippets from LEMURS OF THE LOST WORLD. One was light-hearted, capturing the Malagasy capacity of games and laughter, while the second was the sting in the tail. Reading it out loud brought back some really nasty feelings of an agonising 36 hours, and I was surprised just how powerfully the emotions affected me. I’ve heard it said that people don’t remember pain – maybe that’s true, unless you write about it.

You’ll be pleased to discover that the scorpion didn’t kill me although the sensation in my stung finger STILL isn’t normal. I also survived the experience of the reading and, more importantly, so did my audience. What made them squirm more, in fact, was a story contributed by Claire Verlander who was in the assembled company; she described an unfortunate ring-tailed lemur being swallowed by a boa constrictor. The saddest part was that the victim was a mother, and her infant was left screaming in the treetops.

This weekend I have returned to editing A GLIMPSE OF ETERNAL SNOWS. My new editor at Bradt is helping me to tighten the original writing a bit – reducing word-count is almost always A GOOD THING but this too is a painful process. A local GP colleague who is also an author, Mary Selby (aka Joanna Bell) describes the process as like scooping teeth out with a spoon. It really hurts. So far I’ve managed to cut 6500 words from what was a 141,000 word book, but I suspect more must go. The problem is that this memoir covers our years in Nepal and this was the time when I’ve experienced the very best as well as the very lowest points in my life. The challenge as an author though is to entertain my readers. Glimpse is a joyous book and what I’m working towards is making it even more uplifting than the original read.

Lost in translation?

I was fortunate enough to share lunch with a gathering of East Anglian Writers yesterday and we were treated to an inspirational presentation by renowned academic and writer Sandra Smith, whose translation of Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky has received many plaudits. Sandra talked - fascinatingly - about the challenges and responsibilities of translating, especially posthumous works, and about how it is not just about changing French words for English ones. Idiomatic expressions in particular just don't always literally translate, even between European languages, and context can need 'adjusting'. Clearly in Sandra's work, she must also consider historical settings too.

When I asked Sandra what she does when expressions are untranslatable she said that the emotional essence of an expression is what has to be communicated. Sometimes a completely different metaphor needs to be found.

This made me consider what I do when I write reconstructed dialogue generated from an conversation in the Nepali language, for example. In Kathmandu, people talk of pulling another's leg and the first few times I heard this I presumed that it meant something like the English expression - a tease. But this is very far from what is meant.

To appreciate the idea of pulling someone's leg in Nepal, you should to imagine that the target of the leg-pull is up a ladder and you grab them from below and pull them off the ladder so that you can succeed in their place. It isn't a kind, friendly or generous act. When I discovered this translation I wondered how many other 'difficult' expressions I might have misunderstood and used inappropriately. Oh there is so much scope for misunderstanding, and it seems to me that the better you think you understand a culture, the more hot water you can get into.

Idiom (“Don’t call me an idiom”) and idiomatic expressions are one problem area but in addition I face to the challenge of trying to communicate the poetry and syntax of an unfamiliar language, without making anyone sound retarded when I translate it into English.

I strive to get humour into my prose wherever I can but trying to communicate what I personally find hilariously funny, can fall really flat. For example, the Nepali word for aubergine, baanta, is so similar to bhaanta (vomit) that I find them pretty much indistinguishable so when people talk of cooking or eating baanta I'd find it difficult to suppress silly playground giggles. Consequently I'm sure my Nepali friends and acquaintances think I'm a little unhinged. Similarly my son was especially delighted in what he saw as an almost-pun - the word hissab meaning bill rhymes deliciously with pissab, to urinate. More pausing for tittering.


Meanwhile, what I find odd is why my friends think I have a filthy sense of humour.... especially when it is often a case of the pot calling the kettle black.... or a leg-pull, perhaps

I'm expecting

It was almost as exciting as an antenatal scan... seeing outline drawings of the cover of the new, northern hemisphere edition of A Glimpse of Eternal Snows. The artist, Neil Gower, had cleverly evoked Tharu designs, as well as lots of other elements of the story. Gratifyingly Bradt Publications listen and are interested in their authors (not all publishers are like this) and responded to my feedback. I asked if the designs could be slightly simplified, to mirror the almost child-like style of Tharu artwork making it look more ‘primitive’, more like the stylised forms we were used to seeing in western Nepal. I eagerly awaited the artist’s reaction to my suggestions (I wondered if he might not like what I said), but he absorbed my ideas and made lots of changes including turning the sunflowers into lollypops. THEN I couldn’t wait to see what this would look like once colour had been added.

I didn't have to wait long. The artist added suitably rich colours, in combinations of green, orange, pink and blue that conjure the vibrancy of the Gangetic Plains. It is finished and I'm delighted.

The crazy thing about publishing - and about anything to do with publishing - is that there are bursts of frenetic activity than total silence, until the next mad phase. Today I sent the tweaked typescript of the book to the lovely Commissioning Editor at Bradt so that an independent editor can go through it and see how it can be further improved. Now I predict that there will be a lull while the new editor gets to work. Meanwhile I continue to slowly sift through photos from our six years living in Nepal and have posted more in my Glimpse photo-gallery. I've organised them so that the order of the pictures follow the chapters of the book.