Minutes of the meeting at La Rosa Hotel on the above date.
Present: Ian, Jenny (chair and minutes), Kaz, Michele.
Apologies: Adele, Gill, Harry, John, Pip, Suzanne.
Topic: Members’ work-in-progress.
Matters Arising
Jenny reminded those present that there is one more meeting before the August recess, viz on 18 July 2024. There are no meetings during the month of August. Meetings recommence in September, with the first meeting being on 12 Sept 2024.
Kaz has a friend who writes plays. She may be persuaded to come to a future meeting to read one of her plays.
Members’ Readings
Michele
…read a further instalment of her novel in-progress: The Undesirables, set in Southern Africa during the Boer War, 1898-1902.
We turn now to the fate of Anna’s brothers. Nils is captured on the battlefield and declared a prisoner-of-war, his brother dying in his arms. The khakis help him dig a grave there and then, and the dead man is laid gently to rest. The khakis wait patiently until Nils has knelt and said a prayer over the grave.
Nils is then sent by train and ship to a POW camp on St Helena. Being marched to the camp, he notices a sign in a shop window in Napoleon Street calling for Boer prisoners to be treated with respect as brave fighters. He is made to share a bell tent with 7 other Boer POWs. The food is plain and unvarying (bully beef and bread, which they bake themselves) but sufficient. However all Nils’s tent-mates feel great bitterness, especially against the Boer fighters who voluntarily surrendered.
Michele meant to contrast the relatively humane treatment of Boer men as POWs with the appalling treatment of Boer women and children in concentration camps such as Camp Irene. She attributes this to Lord Kitchener’s misogyny.
Ian
…read again from his uncle Charles Nida’s book: Chota Sahib, a memoir of when he was a box-wallah in India between 1913-1916.
It is 1913 and it’s Charles’s first time on the road as a travelling salesman in general supplies. He reaches the town of Satara, famous for its School of Musketry, hoping to do good business with the trainees. But he hears that the course is over, and the men will presumably be returning to their units. He tries cold-calling on bungalows in the European quarter, but is invariably rebuffed by the native chaprassis, who clearly consider him an inferior order of creation.
Ian revealed that Charles’s manuscript continued beyond the Indian adventure, but he’d felt that Chota Sahib had its natural end when Charles volunteered for the British Army in Flanders and left India for good. Ian would like to publish the rest of the ms as a follow-on memoir, but at 30,000 words it is too short to make an impressive book on its own. Unless padded out with photos of WW1, the Royal Flying Corp, which Charles eventually joined in 1916, and the fledgeling Royal Air Force (RAF) it became at the end of the War.
An enthusiastic discussion ensued on how best to obtain relevant photos without having to pay hundreds of pounds; the benefits and hazards of social media, Meta vs Instagram, and the ever-present threat of cyber-attack for any sort of online researcher, which is what had deterred Ian from exploring the obvious sources: genealogy websites and medals collectors.
Kaz
…read 2 short stories:
(1) an amusing soliloquy about “waiting” behind a shop window, knitting while watching out for business.
(2) what Ian called a very plausible horror story about Derek, a dutiful husband and father, who came home one night and bundled his wife and young son into their car to escape some unexplained danger, with life-changing results for all concerned. It transpired that on Derek’s night-out with the lads, a stage hypnotist had suggested to volunteers from the audience that they were about to be abducted by aliens.
A discussion ensued about members’ knowledge of post-epileptic crimes, staffing a hospital observation unit, and what mental-health nurses could do to violent sufferers that the police couldn’t.
The meeting closed at 1:00 PM.
Whitby Writers Group 