Loving the Alien

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.

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.

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.

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