Inspiration

I wrote a while a go about this collection of photos of unknown Japanese school girls; I came across them in a newspaper article by Drusilla Beyfus who was writing about a prestigious photographic award and week by week looking at the nominees for the 2007 prize; Fiona Tan a half Indonesian Australian photographer had come across this collection of pictures of the anonymous girls I believe in a jumble sale, or junk shop…

I was captivated by these faces, in many ways similar, uniform regulation hair cuts, dark hair, serious expressions, but the more I looked at hem the more the different characters emerged and I knew I wanted to write about them. I don’t know how long I have had the picture, maybe seven or eight years, longer? I’ve looked at it from time to time, but now, at last, my imaginary girls are telling their stories.

I haven’t the knowledge, experience or resources to write about Japan in the 1930’s – I’m not that good a writer, or that expert a researcher, and haven’t the funds to travel to Japan! I had to contrive a way of having an English setting for these young women, and I thought about a school. because I know very little about Japanese culture so imagined these girls in a 1930’s boarding school… but why were they there? Why was this group of thirteen girls there?

I had also been reading a lot about children adopted from abroad and how in the past their own past and heritage was erased and they were forced to be ‘British’ or whatever the new culture was they had been adopted into. I also have read about people who like the idea of adoption and ‘saving’ children, but are not so interested in the reality of it… and of course, ever-present in the news are stories of parents desperate to ‘better’ their children’s lives who pay people smugglers to take their beloved sons and daughters to another country in the hope that they will have a good life, free from war, hunger, violence, poverty…

So I imagined organizations which were little more than human traffickers who were paid at one end by poor families to take their daughters, and paid at the other end by rich English people who wanted to adopt a child. I imagined that these English ‘parents’ might think the best way to educate and bring up their daughters was to send them to boarding school – so the parents had all the kudos and self-satisfaction of knowing they were ‘doing good’ while at the same time not actually having to do anything themselves. I mixed in with this the idea that some children at boarding schools in England who had parents living abroad, maybe serving somewhere in the Empire, or running farms and businesses in other countries – these children were farmed out to relatives over the holidays, and rarely if ever saw their parents for years on end. What would happen to these adopted children who wouldn’t necessarily have adoptive relatives to look after them?

I imagined that a group of such children, Chinese girls, ignorant of their own real families and backgrounds spent term time in a boarding school, but holidays in ‘summer schools’ where for a price they were accommodated, looked after, and given some lessons and activities such as learning to dance, flower arranging, etiquette and short-hand typing…

Did such situations really happen? I have no idea… but in the story I am now writing, my genealogical mystery solver, Thomas Radwinter, is investigating what happened to my totally imagined girls, inspired by this picture,  in the summer of 1931, what happened which resulted in the deaths of two of their number…

If you haven’t read my Thomas Radwinter books, you can find them and my other e-novels here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=lois+elsden