Old photos have always been an inspiration to me. Who were the people in the above photos? What are they doing here? What happened to them? These questions are particularly relevant to these two pictures. Why? Because I know who some of these people were. One of the girls is my aunt. The other girl is the daughter of my grandfather’s gardener. Both girls were on a trip to Germany in August 1939. One person is not shown here. Perhaps he was taking the photos. That man was my father and he was 19 on this trip. The captions in the photograph album tell us very little about these people or about their relationships. The caption to the first photo above reads: Having tea with Albert. The caption to the second photo above reads: Picnic by the Lautersee with Wolffe and Hans. The caption to the third photo below reads: Molly, Joan and Hans.
Reflections on these distant figures and what happened to them was the inspiration for my novel, Feeling the Distance. The ambiguous nature of the title is, of course, deliberate.
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