When war comes, who will save the animals? .... by Miriam Halahmy

I often read the news on my phone.  One morning at the beginning of 2014 I saw a feature which immediately grabbed my attention. It was a story from WW2, a story that I had never heard before and which quite frankly I could hardly believe.
As war broke out in September 1939, there was a great panic about the nation's pets and suddenly queues formed outside the vet clinics as people took up to 750,000 domestic animals - mainly cats and dogs - to be put down.
Remember the CJD crisis when cattle were piled up in a field and burnt? Echoes of the Holocaust? Well, that was the scene in some places.

People called it the Great Pets' Panic and some even referred to it as the September Holocaust. It seemed incredible that in our nation famous for being animal lovers, such a massacre could have happened. Without a doubt pet owners were spurred on by the fact that it was made clear in a government pamphlet that pets would not be allowed in public shelters. How would they be fed when rationing started and wouldn't the dogs go mad when bombs fell and run around biting everyone? This was the kind of reasoning which washed around the streets along with all the war rumours, such as the one that declared there's a kind of gas which kills you and leaves you standing upright in the street!

As I researched further it seemed to me that there was a story to be told here. I have a great passion for history and have a nose for untold stories. I just had to choose my audience. If I wrote a novel for adults, it would probably be quite gut grinding with some of the details I was unearthing. I didn't think this would work as a Y.A. novel - they'd all be too worried about falling in and out of love to focus on the animals. This had to be a children's story, I decided, eight years upwards and of course older readers enjoy a good children's story too.






My next question was, What would the children do if their parents told them that just before they are evacuated, their pets would be taken to the vet and put down because - as the government leaflet said - "It's the kindest thing to do?"
Put up the blackout, send the children away and put down your pets. That's how to get ready for the war!

I grew up in Hayes, Middlesex - here I am outside my old house and I used to play round that lamp post as a kid.
The Grand Union canal goes through Hayes.

There are factories on the other side and I used to ride my bike on this towpath. Back in 1939 when my story is set, the countryside would have been much closer to the town. So I decided to set my story in West London and send my characters over the canal, through some disused factories and into open fields. There would be a wood at the end with a derelict hut in a clearing.

It seemed to me that the children would decide not to give up their pets to be murdered and so they would try and spirit them away until they decided how to save them once war broke out. They decide to call their hideout The Emergency Zoo because someone brings a baby cobra from London Zoo.

I was very keen to have a wide a variety of animals as possible in the zoo. There were hundreds of thousands of animals kept in London before the war, including chickens, caged birds and monkeys. I was desperate to fit a monkey into the emergency zoo but I really didn't think the children would be able to manage. Apart from the cobra, I included a bad tempered goat, a parrot with a horrendous beak and a huge boxer dog.
But of course, most of the pets were the lovely, friendly fluffy kind that most children like to keep.

My book The Emergency Zoo comes out in May 2016. I will be visiting schools to give talks and I've decided that I want to take the zoo with me. So under my desk I have gathered a huge bag of toy animals, including a snake, a very endearing white rat and a rabbit which moves. Can't wait!

www.miriamhalahmy.com

Re-writing the Past - Untold Stories ... by Miriam Halahmy

Bletchley Park

History has always been my great passion, underpinning my whole life as a reader and a writer. As a child I was desperate to know what it was really really like - then.... it didn't matter when to me. I wasn't interested in being present at the great moments of history - the Battle of Waterloo; Florence Nighingale in Sebastopol. I was interested in ordinary people - little girls like me - or teenagers or adults. What did people think, feel, how did they cope without any real medical input, or if they couldn't read and what would it actually smell like in a town where no-one ever took a bath? I would stare for long hours at old photographs of people and try with all my might to get a glimmer of who they really were.

Last month I was asked to speak on Re-Imagining the Past at the LSELitFest on a panel with Philip Womack and Monica Vaughan. For me, it is untold stories which inspires me to write historical fiction.
In HIDDEN, I write about a journey to Dunkirk to rescue British soldiers trapped on the beach. I discovered that five little ships left Hayling for Dunkirk. I actually found one and was invited to go over it and take photos.

The boat above is the Count Dracula, a little ship which went from Hayling Island to Dunkirk and rescued over 200 men in May 1940. It was originally the Admiral's barge for a German battle ship sunk at the battle of Jutland in 1916. The barge was raised and restored between the wars.

 One of the questions I was asked on the LSE Panel was how I could imagine the ending to a novel based on true events from the past.

The Emergency Zoo  (Alma Books, May 2016)  is based on the untold story of the killing of the pets at the outbreak of WW2. It asks the question,When the war breaks out, who will save the animals?

My answer to the question is that no matter how much research I do, when I come to write the book, it is all about the characters. You can't have a plot on an empty stage. Before I start a novel I do quite a lot of work on my cast list. For each character I do the usual age, name, physique, etc but then I break into free writing, letting my imagination wander and it is this writing which leads me into plot lines and the heartbeat of the novel. If I know my characters well - and I always do - then they will lead me through their journey and I will know the ending. In fact, I usually write the final chapter around Chapter 3 and it doesn't  change very much.

I love doing research and have piles of notebooks, artefacts, photos, etc. But at the end of the day, if we are going to re-write the past, then our imaginations must be filled with inspiration, our characters must stand up and stand out on the page and our notes put firmly away, so that we enter the fictional dream and make sure we don't end up writing an essay or lecture about the past. The journey of our characters is the heart of story no matter whether set in the past, present or future.

What inspires you to Re-Write the Past?

http://www.miriamhalahmy.com/

Thinking aloud by Miriam Halahmy

Meg Rosoff observed that writing is 80% day dreaming and 20% writing and I quite agree with that. But I would also add into the mix my speciality - saying it out loud, preferably to someone listening. I really find that actually saying the thoughts tumbling through my mind helps both inspiration and organisation. Even if the audience is the poor old better half who is trying to have a quiet coffee up the road in our local Cafe Nero.

Of course if my audience is one of my experienced writer friends then that's really helpful. I have long suffering friends who meet me for nice literary coffees,long walks on the heath and even too many margaritas. Talking over a plot line or character development with experienced writers can of course help to keep me on the straight and narrow and avoid the pitfalls of the whimsical and outlandish.

But the better half, listening with only half an ear, allowing me to whitter on to my heart's content ( even as he yells, GOAL!) also works for me.



I also need to do my 'thinking aloud' when asked to give a talk. The thing about giving talks - well I find this anyhow- is that each one is slightly different, according to the audience, time factor and many other variables. I don't really have set talks, its more like themes which I can return to.

This month I have been invited onto a panel for the LSE Literary Festival, together with Philip Womack. We have to talk for 15 minutes on Re-writing the past vs Re-imagining the future.

This is a nice one for me because history is a great passion of mine and I've spent practically all my life imagining the past. But as my very first historical novel is due out in May and I am currently writing a second one, both set during WW2, then my thinking aloud currently focuses on how I have brought this era alive and made it relevant to 9-12 year olds.

The Emergency Zoo, (Alma Books, May 2016) asks the question, When war breaks out, who will save the animals? My characters are children aged between seven and fifteen, with the main cluster being four twelve year olds - 2 girls and 2 boys. Imagining their lives, clothes, setting, food, interests, worries and concerns was a mixture of research - my main character Tilly wades through streams and climbs trees all in a dress, usually tucked into her knickers - and quite simply thinking back to when I was twelve and how I viewed the world.

My imagination likes to soar when I am alone and fuelled up with coffee but it also likes time to bounce ideas off someone else and I think it is the very action of saying my words aloud which helps me to focus and develop my stories.

www,miriamhalahmy.com

Writing about asylum seeking children

I have been writing about the experiences of asylum-seeking children for ten years and have read many heart breaking stories. I started with an educational resource commissioned by the Refugee Council entitled, Global Communities.  "I came back from Sunday School," writes Sado, 8, from Somalia, "and I remember seeing that our living room as well as our kitchen had collapsed. Then I saw tanks in front of our house and they began firing. It was terrible."

Giving a voice to the voiceless has been an important part of my drive to write and also to work with asylum seekers helping them to write their stories down. "Go and open the door," writes Noor, 15, "I see my country, I see the building where my family and friends live."
One boy said, "This has been the best day of my life," after he had read out a piece about his homeland, Iraq. At last his voice and his feelings had been heard and acknowledged.

I have always felt that is is huge responsibility to write fiction about the experience of being an asylum seeker. But the desire to show the human side of ordinary people, as opposed to statistics and anonymity, has been the impetus to keep me writing. In fiction I can weave my research into fictional lives to make the experience as authentic as possible while also creating three-dimensional characters my readers can believe in.

After the educational resource came a short story which lead to the writing of my first Y.A. novel, HIDDEN. Two teenagers save a drowning asylum seeker and hide him to save him from being deported. The novel was published in 2011, well before the current refugee crisis. One of my teens, Samir, is also an asylum seeker from Iraq. I was very keen to show that life in Iraq is not only defined by bombs and bullets. Samir talks longingly about his life back home when he helped his mother shop in the markets and played football in the street with his friends. Over the past year there has been a rising interest in HIDDEN again. It will be published in America ( Holiday House, autumn 2016) and has been optioned for the UK stage.

I have just completed a new story, Yasmin's Journey, about a Syrian girl running away from the war, (Ransom Books, October 2016). The book is for teen girls with low reading ages so my limit was 5000 words. Quite a challenge to cover so much ground in so few words!

In researching the book I came across some very sad  stories such as the three year old boy who cried until he was sick because he was separated from his family. Tears rolled down my face as I read this story. Fortunately a charity reunited the child with his parents.

As a writer I think it is fine to feel the pain and sorrow of people who are fleeing for their lives if I am to write an authentic and effective story. But Yasmin, 15, wears jeans and talks about her group of friends on What's App who call themselves The Fun Girls. If I make my book too serious and sad, who will want to read it?

My next book, The Emergency Zoo, (May 2016, Alma Books) is set just before the outbreak of WW2. It is the untold story of the culling of 750,000 pets - a pretty mind-boggling story on its own. But in my research I came across a story about two Jewish sisters from Germany,coming on the Kindertransport, who were desperate not to leave their dog behind. I therefore created a Jewish brother and sister from Frankfurt who become part of  a group of children who save their pets. 10,000 Jewish children came as unaccompanied asylum-seeking children from the Continent before the outbreak of war and mostly their families perished.

It is a sad fact that many of the children who arrive alone in the UK every week, fleeing war and devastation, will never see their families again. It is essential that we find the strength and imagination to write authentic stories which reflect their terrible experiences and give hope that they will be able to build new lives here with us in the UK.

www.miriamhalahmy.com