Today it's my pleasure to hand the reins of the blog over to Janet Pywell, author of the Culture Crime Series, to talk about Location, Location, Location.
I was lucky to work in a sociable industry that’s fun and often conversational, and where I was able to enjoy other people’s anecdotes and listen to their stories.
On a visit to Vilnius I met a Russian lady. We were on a trip where travel agents get to know a location and become familiar with hotels so they can sell the product to their clients back in their home country. One afternoon, a few of us found a small bar in the old town and over a glass of red wine we swapped stories:
She was happily married and had two children; a boy and a girl but when the boy was eight he became very sick. She had no money for his lifesaving medical treatment but she knew an old man with lots of money who liked her. So, she divorced her husband who then walked his ex wife up the aisle to marry the rich old man. She saved her son’s life but the old man wasn’t kind and with a new younger wife, he wasn’t in a hurry to die. When I met her she had just divorced the old man and remarried her first husband whom she’d never stopped loving.
Several years later she showed me professional photographs of her son. He was entering the world of fashion modelling. She had tears in her eyes and her chest was filled with pride and I remembered the story she had told me in far more detail than these few sentences. It made me realise the power of love and the sacrifice that she and her husband endured to make her son healthy and well.
The memory of sitting in the bar as they whispered their stories in broken English and halting sentences, struggling for the right words, amid their painful memories has stayed with me. Years of Russian suppression had built up resentment and I was interested to learn about the lives from the assortment of agents. It was a time when the Baltic countries were separating from Russia, cruise ships weren’t yet pulling in to their ports and ‘no-frills’ airlines had not yet opened up travel opportunities.
But I haven’t written about these people in my novels or these locations.
