mns  2007-11-28 10:38   

Happiness is driving 600 miles to be with friends. It is arriving and being surrounded with that wonderful feeling of relief and joy as smiling faces greet you. It is walking in the freezing cold in the market in Nogent le Retrou as the sun attempts to thaw the frost, wandering among the stalls, knowing that you will all meet up in the nearby bar and drink coffee and aperitifs. It is the comfort of being with good friends.

It is Anno Ronini 65. Yes, Ron Tacchi ages in time faster than the rest of us because of his restructured calendar, and so we gathered again for his New Year, slightly later than the due date because a third of the party was in Shanghai for the Bermuda Bowl, and slightly later than the due time because I took a wrong turning and found myself in the winding streets of Dreux. I think part of the problem may have been because JC and I spoke only French in the car together, and I’ve never been too good on left and right anyway, even in English, so when JC said, ‘Alors, à gauche, Marie,’ I had to think twice, and those short seconds were all that it took for me to get us lost.
Our problem was that our Sat Nav didn’t work for us in France. Anna Gudge and Mark Newton had foreseen that problem and had acquired a French one with an English accent, and it sounded like they spent the journey laughing and trying to identify what was being uttered. ‘Rudy Legless’ was probably the best of this, which turned out to be Rue de l’Église.
But we all did arrive, and then got lost in time. The days passed in a haze of happiness, laughter, conversation, wine and the best of food.

The publication of An Angel at my Back has been postponed to January and I’m busy trying to write a short biography which I’m finding very difficult as I don’t know how to compress my life into three or four sentences. I can never really work out what other people want to know about me, if indeed anything. I like the fact that I used to be afraid of bridges (up until a couple of months ago), but appear to have got over that fear through confrontation, but you can’t put that in a biog. I also like the fact that I was born in a Royal Air Force Hospital, because I imagine all these planes – possibly Spitfires – taking off as I emerged into the world; and I’m intrigued that my godparents never saw me because they had died the week I was born but my parents didn’t find out until later.
I used to wonder why they didn’t get me new godparents but I suppose they were too upset when they found out. My godparents had embarked on a ship in Trinidad to come to England, but when the ship docked they weren’t on it, and they were never found, so maybe my parents kept hoping they would turn up. But they didn’t.
One of my godchildren has forty godmothers, which might seem a bit excessive but always strikes me as being rather good fun. It does mean that an awful lot of people think about her on her birthday and at Christmas, and when you’re a child that counts.

When I first started writing I didn’t feel like I was a real author, not even after my third novel was published, and I didn’t put ‘author’ on forms for several years as I felt it would be fraudulent as I was really just me, Mary Stanley, who happened to have a few books published.
I sometimes still feel that way and then every so often something happens to reinforce the fact that I am a writer, and one of those things happened this last summer. Over the last few years several people have written their thesis on me, and in every case I have given what assistance I can, but this summer I was approached by a Spanish student – Paula Garuz – who was writing her Master’s thesis on my second novel ‘Missing’ and the theory of translation.
Translation has always intrigued me, especially since I worked with several different foreign translators who were translating my novels into their languages, and I became very aware of nuance and meaning and the incredible difficulty of capturing something and translating it accurately. I have always enjoyed that work, and explaining precisely what I meant in using a particular word or phrase.
Paula’s thesis outlines these difficulties so accurately, and explains the problems and how to overcome them. This was the first time I actually got to see the final thesis – in the past I never heard from the students after I had helped them. I was overjoyed, but not surprised, when Paula achieved an Honours Degree.
The other pleasure for me is that we are now friends.