... Christine Hornsby. Thanks for visiting Chris and, from your many books, which scene would you say you
enjoyed writing the most and why?
Oh, that’s an easy one. About a third of the way into “Man out of Jail” I introduce an Italian Internee. He
had been only a shadowy character before – one described in bias, rumour and
counter rumour. When Ben, my protagonist
eventually meets him they experience an immediate connection.
Being Italian, the prisoner of
war was totally different from anyone Ben had ever seen or known before. In pigeon English and with Gino’s expressive
body language and ebullience they were able to communicate. They seemed to have an immediate
understanding of one another’s predicament. At home in London, Ben had been bullied and
that continued to be so. Gino was always
being castigated by the locals because he was different and a representative of
his country’s allegiance to Germany. They
are both far away from home. When Gino
speaks so warmly of his mother and the village where he was brought up and his
life in Monteregione, it takes Ben back to the Jewish influences in his past
life. They experience a shared nostalgia
and empathy for one another’s current circumstances. Alienated from everything familiar I tried to
describe their unspoken togetherness and understanding. Being young and missing his deceased father,
Ben begins to see Gino as a father figure. Not that he feels isolated or too uneasy as an
evacuee on the farm but even before they met, Ben felt an instinctive
understanding of the prisoner of war. Finally,
of course, there is a shared love of art; in Ben’s case cartoons.
I have presented Gino as a
warm, thoughtful and congenial character so the question begs “Why are the
locals antagonistic towards him?” But
Gino is not simply a character I introduce as a distraction. No, he is pivotal to the plot. In his own way, he effects everyone. His warm character is juxtaposed not only with
an angry, cantankerous farmer but also with the prejudices rained against him
by the locals. Even so, I have given him an unfathomable quality... a mystery
surrounds him and it is a mystery that my feisty gran character and Ben need to
unravel.
I chose my internee to be
Italian rather than German or Japanese for example because I love Italy, its
people and the landscapes. I love their
warmth, their art, their culture but also because I thought such a person would
exude a natural warmth, one that Ben could respond to because he is a sensitive
character coming to terms with his own sense of alienation due to his Jewish
background.
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