Lantern Light

Currently I’m awaiting a publisher’s verdict on my latest book – another novel inspired by real life places and people. Real situations.

It’s set in beautiful New Ireland (part of Papua New Guinea) where I taught in 1973. And where I met several of my friends including Glen (now in Cambodia) and Peter, both of whom some of you know.

Peter and I both taught at Madina Girls High School, an astonishingly English-looking place. To get there, we drove down the narrow winding Boluminski Highway, an unsealed road that snaked its way scarily around blind bends in the jungle and coconut palm plantations.

We turned off and wound down narrow car tracks and suddenly entered another world.

A school with neatly but artistically laid out gardens, flowering hedges and cottages - all with the backdrop of the vast green sprawl of the jungle. Immaculately dressed girls worked in the gardens after school, and the happy sound of their singing and giggling filled the air. Madina nestled at the foot of the mountains and only a short walk from the brilliant aqua sea. The heat was stifling in most of the area but Madina enjoyed a lovely breeze from the sea.

The headmistress, Miss Marchment – who has given me permission to set my novel in Madina (which I’ve called Barrington Place) – was an awe-inspiring lady who intimidated many who encountered her. A strong woman with a pioneering spirit, she ruled her school with a rod of iron, the heart of a mother and the soul of an artist. I was very shy with her at first but once I knew her, found her a delightful person who befriended most of her staff.

Clad in what she called ‘my red dress’, Miss Marchment would ‘go to war’ against any red tape or regulations threatening the well-being of her pupils. (Another teacher: Shhh! Miss Marchment’s coming. She’s wearing the red dress!) She tended to get whatever she felt she needed for her charges! Many of these girls have gone on to be high-level professionals in various countries and are still in touch with her.

I’ve called my novel Lantern Light because of the wonderful evenings we spent huddling around hurricane lanterns, talking until all hours, long after the generator had gone off at nine o’clock. There was a peculiar atmosphere of intimacy and security in that capsule of golden light with the dark, whispering jungle brooding around us.

It was an atmosphere that inspired the telling of many secrets. We told one another all sorts of things we would have been slow to tell our friends back in ‘civilisation’. Sometimes the outcome of our confidences was surprising!

The descriptions of Madina and its surroundings are not exact, but I’ve tried to do what Louis de Bernieres (author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin) says he does – to capture the flavour rather than the exact details, to give it ‘literary truth’. (He says that in his Afterword to Notwithstanding, a book inspired by the English village where he grew up.)

Incidentally, my characters and the main story are completely fictitious, although I’ve included a few events inspired by things that really happened to people I knew on New Ireland and have acknowledged this in the Foreword.

Here’s a hint about the plot:

Teaching in the jungle of New Ireland, Ali longs for a greater challenge. Dave loves risks and danger.

 What will this cost them?

And the theme:

Surrounded by brooding but alluring equatorial jungle, Ali and her friends are safe in a capsule of beauty and order.

What will happen if they break the capsule?

So . . . we’ll see what the publisher says.