Minutes of the meeting at La Rosa Hotel on the above date.
Present: Adele, Harry, Ian, Jan, Jenny, John, Laura, Magda, Michele.
Apologies: Gill, Jill, Pip, Suzanne.
Topic: Members’ work-in-progress.
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Matters Arising
None.
Members’ Readings
Laura — described her plan for a survey of her own, following the success of a commissioned survey of 1,000 Teessiders about their attitudes to local developments. Laura is keen to explore local history, and generational attitudes.
Michele — continued reading from her faction novel in-progress: Beneath The Surgeon’s Coat, concerning the career of a military surgeon in 19-cent Cape Town who was actually a woman in disguise. Dr Fryer has joined a government trek into the Cape Town hinterland. Tribal chiefs are visited and encouraged to stop their tribesmen from raiding settlers’ cattle. The governor, Lord Sanders, hears local complaints in a formal court setting.
Sentries are appointed to keep watch at night. The need for protection is not just from local tribesmen, but from wild animals too, which can be heard prowling around the camp in the dark. One night, a boy sleeping in the open is attacked by a lion, which attempts to drag him away. The camp is aroused by the boy’s shouts and scare off the lion. Dr Fryer treats the boy for relatively minor leg wounds.
Adele — read another episode entitled Do we need to talk about Security? from her (as yet untitled) Estate Agent memoir.
The office has become open-plan, though the bosses have their own private offices and are mostly out playing golf. With computers lessening the need for women confined to support roles, social barriers to appointing female estate agents seem to be dissolving.
One day a burly ruffian, incensed at a For Sale notice seeming to hint that it was his house for sale, demanded to see Mr T. The staff invited Mr T out into the open-plan office to talk to the man, who then gave him a bloody nose. Mr T is saved by “Karen”, who drags off the assailant and kicks him out.
Jan — is co-authoring the memoir of a friend called Alice (unable to write for herself), who with her husband and two toddlers lived off-grid in a tiny French village near La Rochelle.
Alice decides it would be fun to try living for a year entirely off their own resources, though it becomes apparent that the village is secretly supporting her in this daring venture.
Harry — distributed copies and read another instalment of A Last Swing of the Lamp, his memoir of serving in the Merchant Navy as radio officer. The SS Marwarri is at moorings in Aden – a free port, with plenty of attractive consumer goods on sale duty-free. The impecunious crew are unable to buy as much as they’d like. They enjoy listening to The Navy Lark on BBC Radio, with its solecisms about life at-sea. At (belated) New Year celebrations a brawl breaks out, triggered by the “Marconi Boy” trying to steal all the free cigarettes provided by the Captain.
Jenny — continued reading from her period novel based on the historical figure of Mary Eleanor Bowes, the heiress of a vast fortune from the Durham coalfields. Mary and her wayward husband Andrew Stoney are at Gibside, when Andrew is campaigning to fill the recently vacated seat in Parliament. He loses by a mere 100 votes. While at Gibside, Andrew promises to make each day worse than the last for Mary, in revenge for pre-arranging that he can’t get his hands on the Bowes capital. Before they return to London he dismisses the bulk of the staff for their perceived loyalty to Mary, including the valiant Lizzie and her husband George. Mary does everything she can to placate Andrew, becoming pregnant yet again. Andrew hopes for a male heir and confines Mary to a cottage to have her baby and give it her whole attention, which prove to be the happiest 4 months Mary ever gets with Andrew. Once the child is born – a girl – Mary is compelled to go through the absurd charade of a fake pregnancy, at the end of which the months-old baby is “delivered”, to the secret amusement of the society they move in. The child is named Mary after her mother.
Ian — read from his novel in-press: Anitra’s Petition. After all her wild adventures getting to Nix City on the planet Mars, Anitra is now about to present her petition for human rights in the Court of the Goubernator.
In a Kemetic court the blindfolded zati (judge) is assisted by three Fanbearers. To her amazement, Anitra sees Hermes taking the role of the Fanbearer Behind The Throne.
The meeting closed at 1:10 PM.
Links (in accession order)…
Contact https://whitbywriters.com/contact/
La Rosa Hotel www.whitbywriters.com/venue
Adele https://whitbywriters.com/adele-duffield/
Ian www.whitbywriters.com/ian-clark
Anitra’s Petition https://whitbywriters.com/anitras-petition/
Whitby Writers Group 