The Making of Marigold McGrath, Guest Post by Carrie Hayes

New York City, 1937. Seventeen-year-old Marigold McGrath is coming undone.

Her mother is dead. Her father is drawn to dangerous politics. The only place she feels joy is behind a camera — where she can frame the world on her own terms.

After a series of her own missteps, she reinvents herself in London: mentored by a celebrated émigré photographer, photographing Kindertransport children, working alongside Edward R. Murrow. She falls in love with Joop, a charming Dutch student, and shrugs off the war gathering around her.

Then the Blitz begins.
Joop vanishes into the Dutch Resistance. And Marigold — who has always preferred to photograph the world as she wishes it were — must finally decide what kind of woman, and what kind of witness, she is willing to become.

A sweeping WWII coming-of-age novel set in wartime London.

The Kindertransport

I belong to a writers group where the mother of one of our members had been – at the age of four, on the Kindertransport out of Vienna. Then I met another woman who lives a couple of miles from me, whose mother was on the Kindertransport out of Berlin. Before meeting either of these women, I had vaguely been aware of what the Kindertransport was, but WW2 was not my thing. There is so much of it, everywhere, that as a novelist, I preferred to look back into the nineteenth century, rather than the period where there was still living memory. But when Melissa, the woman from my writer’s group, showed us a rough cut of her film 256,000 Miles from Home, (https://www.256000milesmovie.com/trailer) the heartbreak at these elderly, elderly people describing how it felt -as children -on those trains leaving home- for what would become forever, was staggering. Just thinking about it now takes my breath away.

Around that time, I was deep into my second novel- which is a Gilded Age story- so the events leading up to and around WW2 could not have been further from my mind. But, coincidentally, quite by accident, I stumbled across a clip from the BBC, wherein Nicholas Winton was reunited with a room full of the children (who were now in their late fifties), whom he had personally been responsible for getting out of Czechoslovakia.

And that was the thing- there were kids from everywhere who needed to get out of harm’s way- and there were actually people, ordinary people who despite their respective governments dragging their feet, were making it happen. Then I read Meg Waite Clayton’s novel, The Last Train to London which is about some children from Vienna and is so sad, one has to put it down from time to time to remind oneself that the protagonist is going to make it, because he’s the protagonist! But it was hard, yet something began percolating somewhere in my imagination.

Months later, on a trip to London, I was standing in the gift shop by the entrance of the Imperial War Museum. I had just seen the exhibits about London in the Blitz and the exhibit upstairs on the Holocaust, when three little books caught my eye. The English and their Country for Overseas Forces, Plans for the German Invasion of The British Isles 1940 and Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain 1942. These were all texts that were contemporary to the period and I stood there, mulling through them when Marigold just manifested herself. She would be a young girl, on the edge of womanhood, she would be an American and she would be there in Britain.

It was impossible to know how her story was going to work, but I did know that it was time to bone up on England during WW2.

I am a native New Yorker who attended British public school from the age of twelve and for some reason, history in school only consisted of Tudors and Stuarts, and not much else. Downtime and holidays were mostly spent in Chelsea. This was in the 1970s and early ’80s and like many of my schoolmates, I knew nothing, I mean next to nothing, about Britain and the War. Our elders, all of whom either served or were children and certainly lived through the war said little about those years. The quips were mostly “such and such happened. It was during the War.” And that was it. The War would be mentioned but only in passing.

I should add here that the school I attended is Battle Abbey, in East Sussex. It’s the site of the Battle of Hastings- and we had, as you can imagine- history galore. What we girls did not know however, was that there was a prison camp on the edge of the village with 500 POWs from Germany and Italy. None of us knew that. Nor did we know that Hastings had in fact been bombed countless times during the war. We didn’t know that either! Nor did we know that the village green (right outside the gates of the school) was bombed. All of these things happened, less than forty years before, and none of us as students had any idea.

As for Chelsea, I had grown up COMPLETELY oblivious to the fact that its proximity to the Thames made it one of the most heavily bombed neighborhoods during the Blitz. Chelsea Concerto, written by Frances Faviell is a first-hand account of what it was like to live there through that time, and much of it was truly frightening and beyond tragic. I also didn’t know that the greatest loss of American lives in Britain during the war took place on July 3rd, in 1944 in Chelsea. Sloane Court East to be exact.

A lot of the things that happened then and the photographs that survive really shock me when I think about war today. That so much was destroyed and lost, and that it has been allowed to happen again, on much the same scale seems to make the horror of it all even worse. These photos are by Cecil Beaton and are in the public domain. I am sure many of the readers have seen them before.

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Meet Carrie Hayes

Carrie’s first two novels, Naked Truth or Equality and Well Dressed Lies, follow the lives of the iconoclastic suffragist sisters, Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin.

Carrie lives with her husband and two spoiled dogs in a rambling Victorian house just outside of New York City.