The year is coming to an end, another about to begin. In front of me lies a virgin diary. Its ruled divisions into days, weeks, months represent an uncharted future. Just as I did last year and the year before, I stare at the blank pages, wondering what will fill them. Will 2019 be good or bad or a balanced mix? Who will I meet? What unexpected events – personal or political – will mark it? Will my loved ones stay safe from harm? It sounds dramatic but can I even count on surviving the year? This year, amongst my friends, one was diagnosed with an already well-advanced cancer that came completely out of the blue to him. Another friend lost her partner, also due to an undetected cancer; he lived for only weeks from first diagnosis. But the future can also bring unlooked for miracles: hopes fulfilled, unexpected joys, triumphs over adversity.

The blank pages of a new diary have something in common with the blank page – whether on screen or paper – that faces a writer. The difference is one of agency. I have only partial control over what will happen in the year to come. World events, accidents, illness, freak weather, other people’s actions are beyond my personal control, whereas I can fill the blank page of my story, poem or novel with whatever I choose.

As I began to jot down the first entries for 2018 at the close of last year– a family reunion in Wales for New Year, my return flight to Granada, the resumption of classes, lunch with my publisher – I had no intimation of what would intervene to derail some of these arrangements. No idea that my house would catch fire, forcing me to move out for a month. Not an inkling that one of the absurdly expensive hearing aids I depend on for communication would fall out and be irretrievably lost. Nor the slightest intimation that the publishing contract I’d secured a month earlier would, halfway through the year, be cancelled. (Had I known in advance that three months later it would be reinstated, my summer would have been a good deal happier.) The accumulation of all these unexpected events made a big hole in my finances that I could not have anticipated.

2019 will, I hope, be better. On the personal level I have the publication of my novel, The Red Gene, to look forward to in April. Soon I will begin planning the launch and, hopefully, more talks, presentations and interviews in the UK and in Spain. Will the spark for a new novel strike? Of the various half-formed ideas in my mind will one compelling project emerge? Or will I continue with and perhaps complete the memoir I am currently working on?

On the global stage I am more fearful than at any time since the eighties, when the threat of nuclear war – by design or accident – appeared highly credible. I spent considerable amounts of my time during that decade campaigning against nuclear weapons. Now the dangers are multiple and I fear more for my children and grandchildren and their entire generations than for myself. I fear for the hungry and dispossessed of the world, the refugees and victims of war, of climate disaster and the poisoning of the environment. I am afraid in the face of rising fascism in Europe, east and west, and in America, north and south.

Those are depressing thoughts for the start of a new year but there is always hope in new beginnings, the renewed energy that comes with longer days and the budding of nature in all its forms. Change for the better is possible if we care enough and don’t give up the struggle.

To end on a lighter note, this coming New Year’s Eve I will make sure to don my red underwear – Spanish superstition deems it essential if you want to ensure good luck in the year to come. Needless to say, it slipped my mind on 31^st December last year.

A HAPPY AND PEACEFUL NEW YEAR TO ALL

Sometime in the next few weeks I will take a bus to Málaga and collect my German citizenship papers from the Consulate there. As if having two identities, two countries I can call home is not enough, I am about to acquire a third.

In 1933, my father, who came from a secular Jewish family in Berlin, left Germany and headed for London. It proved a wise move. He studied and qualified for a new career, changed his name to one that sounded more English and when the Second World War broke out, joined the British army. After the war, he married my mother, also from a European background. Both had by now acquired British nationality. They had three children and lived a more or less conventional life. No German was spoken in our home, we were all baptised and sent to Sunday School; we felt as English as anyone else. In fact I took great pains to conceal my parents’ foreign origins. To be German in the fifties – not so long after the end of the war – was to be associated with the baddies of comics and playground games.

How could I ever have foreseen that in my late sixties, I would be applying to become a German national? For twenty years now I have had a foot in two countries, but neither of them is Germany. The bigger footprint is in Spain, where I’ve lived since 1999; Granada is the place I call home. And yet I still have a stake in the country of my birth. All my family are there; I fly over frequently to see them. I am still more at ease speaking English than Spanish. My sense of humour is more English – and probably a slight eccentricity too. But this split identity does not include Germany. I’ve been there three times, the last in 1974 on my way to Kathmandu. I studied German at school up to A-level but have rarely used it since. However, with a chaotic Brexit looming, I am liable, along with several million others – Britons resident in Europe and Europeans resident in Britain – to have my whole life overturned if the UK ceases to be part of Europe. Spain does not allow dual nationality; Germany does. So when the German government offered citizenship to the descendants of all those forced to flee by the Nazis, it seemed only sensible to apply. Together with other members of my family, we assembled the necessary documents and sent them off. My siblings and their children, my son and even my Scottish grandchildren have duly been granted German nationality. How ironic that the country my father fled has now made me one of its citizens with the right to a passport.

I don’t expect to become German in any meaningful sense. It will ease my life by helping avoid visa applications, border queues and other bureaucratic obstacles whenever I travel to or from the UK. Perhaps I will visit Berlin and explore the city of my paternal roots. Perhaps I will try to brush up my German. But understanding and feeling at home in two cultures is hard enough; I don’t think I could start from scratch with another. Adapting each time I move between my two countries is a disorienting process. The switch from one language to the other is the least part of it. Much trickier are the cultural and lifestyle disparities – more pronounced than I would ever have imagined before I came to live in Spain. The differences shout out at me every time I go back: attitudes to personal space, to touch, to punctuality, to noise levels, to what is regarded as tolerable and what is beyond the pale. The different timetable for eating and sleeping disrupts my body rhythms; I roam the supermarkets bewildered by the vast range of ready meals, shocked at the prices. I feel like an outsider.

When I lived in Britain, the novels I wrote had British settings. The culture was familiar; I’d been immersed in it all my life, absorbed it from birth. But cultures don’t stand still. After ten years or so in Spain, I found I was out of touch with 21^stcentury Britain. I could no longer write convincingly of contemporary life. The cultural references familiar to my family and British friends meant nothing to me. Yet setting my fiction in Spain also posed problems. I could write from the viewpoint of guiris, the foreigners resident in Spain, as I did in Secrets of the Pomegranate. The three main protagonists in that novel were English by birth. To write from the perspective of Spanish characters, whether historical or contemporary, presented a much greater challenge. It felt imperative that what I wrote should be authentic enough to convince Spanish as well as native English readers. But did I have the necessary in-depth understanding of the Spanish mind-set and culture, contemporary and historical? After all, I was an outsider here too.

In writing The Red Gene (to be published April 2019), I took on this challenge. Twenty years of living in Spain have given me some insight, or so I like to think. In addition, for the historical parts in particular, I researched widely, reading extensively in Spanish as well as English, watching Spanish films, talking to Spanish friends. However, what helped most, without a doubt, was interviewing older people, recording the small details of their lives as they remembered and recounted them, as they told me their stories. I am immensely grateful to all of them.

Over the years, I have developed a keen interest in the history of my adopted country, in particular its more recent history: the 2^nd Republic, the Civil War, Franco’s dictatorship. Learning more about the part played by the International Brigades who came to support the elected government in their fight against fascism led me to wonder if my father had ever considered joining the Brigades. They had a large contingent of Jews – several thousand – from the East End of London, from the United States, Hungary, Germany and above all Poland. Many of them were communists or socialists alarmed by the rise of anti-Semitism. According to some estimates, 70% of the medical volunteers were Jewish. My father wasn’t the fighting type and he’d studied law, not medicine, so it’s unlikely he would have considered it, but he may well have had friends who did. He would certainly have been aware how important it was to support the Spanish Republicans in their fight against the rebels, who without the help of Hitler and Mussolini would not have succeeded. How I would love to have discussed all this with him but he died in 1972 when I was barely grown up. Neither of us could have anticipated that I would develop such an interest in 20^th century European history or that the war in Spain would form the background to a novel I would one day write.

As we watched the hulk of the overloaded ship finally cast off into the dark, carrying our hopes with it, the chimes of some distant church clock reached us faintly through the damp night air. Twelve o’clock. Time, which had been measured only in the slow forward movement of the throng, now took on a different meaning as a collective slump of despair spread through the thousands still waiting at the port. A seemingly impossible number of refugees had succeeded in boarding the British ship. But now the Stanbrook had gone, tilting low in the water, and we were left stranded, at the mercy of the cruel victors whose arrival could not be far off. How much time remained?

Children were crying, an old man standing near us cursed the fascists, yelling his abuse into the darkness while his wife made futile attempts to calm him. Rumours of rescue passed in forlorn wisps from one group to another, forming and dissolving like ripples on the ocean. But mostly people were silent, exhausted by days and nights on the road, trudging with as many of their possessions as they could carry, defeated, despairing, afraid.

The above was an early draft of the opening paragraphs of The Red Gene. I was still experimenting with possible scenarios, still deciding where to situate my protagonists as the inevitability of a Republican defeat in the Civil War became clear. In the end, I discarded it and took the plot in a different direction; I set Rose and Miguel elsewhere as they faced the prospect of imminent victory for Franco. But the scene I described, in the port of Alicante, was realistic enough by all accounts.

Fifteen thousand people had gathered at the port in the hope of escaping Franco’s forces. The Stanbrook was captained by Archibald Dickson, a Welshman who left his cargo of oranges and saffron on the dockside and instead allowed two and a half thousand desperate refugees to board his vessel, occupying every inch of space above and below deck. Leaving the port, he had to brave missile attacks from the rebel destroyers forming a blockade there. The Stanbrook took its shipload of refugees to Oran in Algeria, where they remained on board for a month in dire conditions before being allowed to disembark. They ended up in internment camps but at least they had escaped Spain.

Those refugees were the last to leave. As thousands more continued to join the waiting crowds over the next few days and no more ships arrived, many committed suicide, drowning or shooting themselves. The rest, some forty-five thousand, were rounded up by the Italian troops fighting on Franco’s side. Families were forcibly separated (does that ring any bells?). The women and children were packed into a cinema, where they had no access to water for washing and virtually nothing to eat, while the men and older boys were taken to the bullring or to an almond orchard known as Los Almendros, basically an improvised concentration camp. Later they were moved to another camp at Albatera where once again they had to sleep in the open with no protection from wind or rain, where they were deprived of food and water beyond a minimum – scarcely enough to keep them alive – and forced to work in the salt marshes. They were frequently beaten; many died of fever or starvation; others were shot, supposedly trying to escape.

During the course of the war, a steady stream of refugees had been heading over the French border as different regions fell to Franco’s rebels. By the time it became clear, in early 1939, that all hope was lost for the Republicans, nearly half a million had fled across the Pyrenees into France. They fared little better than those trapped in Spain. Interned in camps and held in intolerable conditions, large numbers died of cold, malnutrition or disease. Of those who survived, thousands were later transferred to German concentration camps, the majority to Mauthausen, where most ended up in the gas ovens.

Some, however, had better luck. Mexico, one of the few countries to welcome Republican refugees from Spain, sent ships to France, the first being the Sinaia in 1939. During the next three years, Mexico took some 25,000 of the Spaniards who had fled over the border, liberating them from the French camps. On arrival in the port of Veracruz, their passengers were given a heroes’ welcome.

Nowadays the prevailing image of refugees is of black or brown people fleeing from Syria or Afghanistan or Iraq or sub-Saharan Africa. Europe is fortifying its borders against the invading hordes, as many see them. It’s too easy to forget who started the wars or caused the environmental destruction that forced these people to flee. What does it cost to leave your home, your family and friends, your possessions, your country; to embark on a journey you know will be fraught with countless dangers; to expose your children to those dangers? How does it feel to be greeted – if you finally succeed in arriving in a safe country – by hostility and suspicion; to be locked up in a detention centre, deprived of basic human rights and any semblance of dignity; faced with the threat of being sent back where you came from? Who would do it other than as a last resort?

Memories are so short. We are all potential refugees. Eighty years ago, the exodus was in the opposite direction: refugees were fleeing Europe from Hitler or Franco. It could happen again; any minority group is at risk. Right now, sixty-eight million people are displaced due to war or persecution, one in every 110 of the world’s population. The vast majority are in developing countries, their own or neighbouring ones. But since 1993, some 34,000 have drowned in the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe; countless others have died crossing the desert.

Politicians pander to populist opinion for electoral advantage, while much of the press influences that opinion by using dehumanising vocabulary to describe migrants and refugees. They exaggerate the numbers with terms like swarm and flood and invasion, designed to instil fear. Refugees are referred to as animals, cockroaches, criminals and terrorists, outsiders who do not share our ‘European values’. Hungary’s Victor Orbán has made it a crime to aid migrants and now the EU has ruled that NGOs should stop rescuing drowning refugees, instead leaving it to the Libyan coastguards. Who cares if they are left to drown? Or subjected to torture and slavery? European values??

It seems to me that not only journalists but fiction writers too could play a part here. Stories that give names and personalities to migrants and refugees are desperately needed to counter the depersonalising vocabulary of press and politicians. The image of a dead Syrian child, Aylan Kurdi, caught people’s imaginations and led to a call for more humane treatment of refugees (though the effect proved to be short-lived). Novels, poetry, plays, films could perhaps help change the opinions of those who see refugees as a threat. Every migrant is an individual with a history (often a tragic one), a human being who feels and suffers like any of us and just wants a life free from danger. It seems so obvious, yet it’s easy to forget. Reading about individuals, whether real or fictional, helps us to relate, to see the world through their eyes, feel their fear and despair, understand their hopes and dreams.

A stressful few months have left me pondering whether a life beset by problems is useful for the novelist or whether what he or she needs is a tranquil, trouble-free existence safe from the intrusion of any disrupting influences. Do heartbreak and suffering in the author’s life make it easier to empathise with their protagonists, providing interesting experiences to draw on, or do these merely distract from the writing process? Isn’t writing a novel a difficult enough task without the interference of personal conflicts and dramas that demand to be dealt with?

Dickens had a hard childhood and a complicated domestic life, having married, only to become infatuated with his wife’s sister, who died not long after. Twenty-two years later, he left his wife and ten children for his much younger mistress. None of this seemed to hamper his creativity. With such a large family to support, he had to keep writing. Poverty was and still is a driving force for writers who need to sell books to survive. J K Rowling was a single mother on benefit until she made it big with her Harry Potter stories.

Many famous novelists (along with a great number of poets) were known to have been depressives: Mark Twain, Stephen King, Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf among them. Alcoholism and mental illness are far from rare in writers. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, was an alcoholic, his marriage with Zelda notably stormy. Hardy too had a difficult relationship with his wife Emma. As a shy and secretive man, writing served as a catharsis for him, an outlet for his grief and mental torment. His emotional state was reflected in his novels. Because he drew on his own life for material, the later works tend to be sadder than those written earlier in his career.

The Bronte sisters had seclusion aplenty in childhood but their lives were plagued by ill health and far from easy. Charlotte Bronte, the last surviving child of Patrick and Maria, suffered one family bereavement after another, losing her mother from cancer and one by one, her brother and each of her sisters, who all died in their thirties from TB or other illnesses. She also knew the heartache of romantic disappointment, having suffered unrequited love for her teacher in Brussels. Writing provided some solace for all these losses but she herself died at 38, not long married and in the early stages of pregnancy. George Eliot led a somewhat happier life but as a woman with unconventional beliefs and lifestyle, she certainly didn’t have it easy.

Tolstoy, on the other hand, was at his most creative and successful in a period of his life that was also the happiest and calmest – during the first ten years of his marriage. Many of the characters in War and Peace were based on family members, friends and acquaintances and his novels contained a great deal of biographical material drawn from the detailed journals he kept.

Love can be inspiring. In my experience, a good relationship gives enormous creative energy. A bad one saps your energy and kills creativity. Rejection, anger, jealousy, grief can have a crippling effect. Alternatively, they may help you empathise with your fictional characters. After all, the basic human emotions are universal. It may be a matter of timing. The difficult or challenging times should, ideally, come between novels, not when you’re in the thick of writing them, when they are indeed a huge distraction. However, writing can also provide a welcome escape from your problems. If you can cross that threshold into the fictional world you have created and become absorbed in it, life’s troubles can be forgotten for hours at a time.

Those who lead solitary lives – lighthouse keepers or national park rangers, for example – often turn to writing. Solitude gives space to the imagination and a rich inner life may be just as stimulating to creativity as the constant hustle and bustle of the world most of us live in. The popularity of writing retreats attests to the importance of time spent alone.

Among the reviews of Secrets of the Pomegranate, the comment that pleased me most was ‘This is a writer who understands people’. Perhaps if my experience had been confined to one happy, stable marriage with emotional and financial security, few challenges or setbacks, the urge to write would have been less strong. Although I feel extremely fortunate in most ways, my life has had its share of ups and downs. If I hadn’t known the anguish of a miscarriage, the stress of divorce, the sadness of losing the love of my life, the trauma of going deaf, my writing would have lacked that understanding. Even in fiction, I am writing from the heart.