Planning the year ahead

Given its topicality the coincidence of Without Let or Hindrance being published just as the series Ridley Road was broadcast on British TV, end of 2021, demands that my next blog will be entitled ‘Sleeping with Fascists’.  And it’s not just ‘my’ Veronica or the BBC’s ‘Vivien’ who were motivated by defeating the fascists.  Others were not so much sleeping with the enemy as giving their souls, together with their bodies, to further a cause dear to their hearts – and two of these, Diana Mitford and her sister Unity also appear in my novel. (Lol! I wrote the above before I had seen the final episode of Ridley Road - OMG what an ending. I’ve just been reading the tweets of people understandably confused by it - and the mind-boggling ‘explanations’ provided by well-meaning people who nevertheless were not aware of just how incorrect that scene was. V glad to hear that it was not in Jo Bloom’s book). 

Other historical figures appearing in Without Let or Hindrance will feature in future blogs:  RAB Butler MP, Anthony Eden and Winston Churchill.  Of course, readers can google all of these but I intend to write about them in the context of the novel and freely accepting that I will be writing from my own perspective which may be different to what you’ll read on Wikipedia.

Some readers have asked about the absence of a historical footnote in the first edition of Without Let or Hindrance and I intend to address these too in future blogs, again giving my personal view:-

The narrative takes place against the background of a series of historical events – and particularly from the perspective to the soon-to-be-annihilated Jewish population of Europe, 1938 was full of momentous events – not one of them joyful.

Here is a list of these some of which I would like to address, at some point, in future blogs.

1)      Anschluss – the German takeover of Austria

2)      The Conservative appeasers

3)      The Evian Conference

4)      The Palestine Partition Commission

5)      The German Officers’ plot against Hitler

6)      Appeasement and the Munich Conference

7)      The assassination of a German official at his embassy in Paris (subsequently covered in article in the Jewish Chronicle - see Articles)

8)      The Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht) -  the organised violent attacks on Germany’s Jews

9)      The arrival of the first Jewish refugee children in Britain