So far, this is all the information I have about Douglas Bruce, the recipient of the love letters I refer to in the previous post. I would be really grateful if anyone could find out more about him and/or his descendants .

Douglas G* Bruce was employed by the Asiatic Petroleum Company. The earliest evidence of his employment there is this company memo, dated in pencil, Wuchow 1915.

The memo itself was certainly not written during business hours, as you can see from my transcript of the original handwritten ‘poem’ .

The date on the back of the photo of Shing Mui is July 1916, so it is likely that her letters to Mr Bruce were written around that time.

(There were two studio photos of young Chinese women – the one here, and in my previous post has her name written on it. ) I’m not sure whether or not the girl below is a younger version of the same person. In one of my next posts I’ll be including an early, rather grainy photo of Mr Bruce with 4 young Chinese women, one of whom might be Shing Mui.

I’ve been trying to work out when and where Mr Bruce was born. There’s very little to go by, but he would probably have been in his late teens or early twenties, and this would place his birth in the early or mid 1890s.

The first letter from ‘Bessie’,
the married English woman,
would have been written in Canton in 1920,
or even 1919, and Mr Bruce must have been relatively young at that stage, as Bessie writes:
“What do you mean by upsetting the equilibrium of two highly respectable (!) ladies in their heretofore blissful states of married and single blessedness? And two at once mind you! And you so young and all.”

One of Bessie’s final letters to Mr Bruce shows that she also calls him ‘Gragg’, which seems to be his middle name*(see above).

If that is so, it could make him easier to track down as Douglas Graff Bruce, born sometime in the 1890’s, probably somewhere in London, as this picture seems to be the earliest one that I have and the picture was taken by London Portrait Co Ltd, 58, New Oxford St., W.C. 109 Finsbury Pavement 8 Aldgate High St, E.C.

In this one he might be a year or two older, because of what looks like the start of a moustache. It was taken by J.J. &S. Johnson – Artists & Photographers, Glossop Road, Sheffield. Is he wearing a uniform of some kind?

There are several more photos and a few more documents that might help readers to trace this man, and his friends, both men and women. This small photo below, taken in 1919 shows Mr Bruce on the right and his friend Mr Meyer, who appears in several other photgraphs and was clearly a very close friend, as there’s a picture of a baby boy named Bruce Meyer.

Although I know that readers of Paper Lanterns have enjoyed the novel, and the storyline of the main character’s grandmother that I’ve created, based on all this material, I have now become totally absorbed in all these real-life characters, most of whom, if not all, will have long departed this life. In fact, I have to admit that it’s becoming an obsession!

PLEASE do circulate the link to this challenge! (And remember that anyone who contacts me with new information will receive a free a copy of Paper Lanterns or The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society)

This will be my shortest ever post – I just wanted to say ‘HAPPY CHRISTMAS’ to my regular visitors and to anyone who has landed here by chance. The picture above is a small detail of the traditional decorations on my tree.

This one is one I took last Sunday, before a heavier fall of snow on Monday threatened to prevent my sister and family from Cornwall arriving to spend the night with us en route to their destination in snowy Scotland.

I also want to alert you to my new challenge for the start of 2011.

On the ‘My Novels’ page, you’ll find more information about my 2nd published novel, Paper Lanterns

Frequent visitors will already know that the middle part of the novel is set in 1930 in Hong Kong, and that this section was inspired by the discovery of a cache of love letters. The story of that find was so interesting in itself, that the Birmingham Sunday paper published a two-page spread about the find, and included some of the original photographs.

I shall be posting more pictures of the real-life characters involved, as well as some of the handwritten letters, because my big challenge for the new year is to see if I can find any of their descendents.

All will be explained in my next post,
so keep an eye open.
You might know someone
who just happens to know someone who used to go to school
with someone whose grandmother used to know
the daughter of
someone who …..

MEANWHILE,
HAVE A VERY HAPPY
FESTIVE SEASON
WHEREVER
IN THE WORLD
YOU ARE!
(I saw this swan in my local park - it made me laugh!

I arrived back in the UK on Sunday (in spite of snow at Birmingham airport delaying my departure from Schipol airport for over three hours.) The main purpose of my short trip to Hong Kong was to visit my mother, still going strong at the age of 93. She is staying with my sister on Lamma Island, the setting for a large part of my novel Paper Lanterns.

It was mere luck that I’d taken delivery of several copies of my book two days before I was due to fly out to Hong Kong. I couldn’t waste this chance of finding a home for my new novel in some of the book shops there. (This photo of me holding copies of my book was taken by my sister, in front of the same view that I’d used for the cover of the book itself.)

I soon discovered that my timing wasn’t all that brilliant when it came to marketing: this picture of the ferry pier on Lamma might give you a clue.

Those bright red globes and the strings of coloured flags are there to mark the Chinese New Year, an event that stretches over several days, during which, most businesses shut down. Not an auspicious week for arranging meetings!
But I was lucky after all, as the organiser of the prestigious Hong Kong Literary Festival was able to make time for me last Thursday morning, two days before I was due to return home. She was interested in my brand new publishing house, Novel Press, and very encouraging about the chances of my book in Hong Kong. She gave me several useful contacts: I made a few phone calls, sent a few emails and was invited by two of the three main bookshop chains to post them a copy of Paper Lanterns.

More exciting still, was the email I received from the third company, asking if I could meet with the manager the following afternoon. This publishing business is heady stuff! I arrived at the address, a large bookshop in the bustling shopping area of Kowloon, and focussed on the table displaying books with Chinese connections, both general interest and fiction. It didn’t seem an impossible dream that copies of Paper Lanterns might soon be lying among them, face up, waiting to be lifted from the pile and taken to the till.

A few minutes later, I was following a young sales assistant out of the bookshop door, and into the office part of the building, where I was ushered into the manager’s office, a charming and efficient young woman. She was particularly interested in the real-life love letters which provided the inspiration for a central section of the novel. I’ll explain more about these letters soon.

Bookshops in the UK usually tend to accept books on a sale-or-return basis, and it would be unlikely that a store would order more than one or two copies from an unknown author. When the books in question have to delivered from the other side of the globe, returning them to the publisher wouldn’t be a viable option. You can imagine my delight when the manager indicated that they might be able to accept 20 books to begin with!

Now I have to look into the cost of freight, yet one more step on the steep learning curve I’ve been treading since the inception of Novel Press.

Back to Chinese New Year for a moment - traditionally a time for giving plants and flowers. Huge crowds flock to Victoria Park in Central to select gifts for their families and friends from the Flower Market that lasts for several days, finishing on the night of the New Year’s Eve. But as you’ll see from this picture, there are also souvenirs on sale at stalls staffed by youngsters learning to develop an understanding of business.This is the year of the tiger, hence these tiger hats. In spite of the cold wind and rain, they never stopped smiling. If only we could have bottled this enthusiasm and good will!

Today I’ve been exploring ways of having a cover designed for my new novel, Paper Lanterns. This is a digression. I’d intended to post an account about what happens to a book (in my case, anyway) between the time it’s been accepted by a publisher (what joy!!) and the actual publication date.

This whole blog, Writing Matters, has turned me into a time-traveller, taking me back and forth over more than two decades (with additional interruptions each Sunday when I post my Poem of the Week), and since I’d been remembering my feelings of delight when I was sent the first piece of A4 cardboard showing the front and back cover and the spine for The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society it seemed like a good time to start thinking seriously about the cover for Paper Lanterns.

Browsing through book shops and handling their various covers, has brought home to me that, whatever people might say about not judging a book by its cover, if the cover doesn’t attract the person doing the browsing in the first place, they won’t even pick it up, still less, read the ‘blurb’ on the back and start to make any kind of judgement.

So I opened my copy of my first published book and checked out the name of the company that had produced the cover - Baseline Arts Ltd, Oxford. They’d done a good job with mine and many of the other Transita novels so I looked them up on the web and rang them.

By the end of our conversation, I had a clearer understanding of the importance of the wording on the back cover. I wrote my brief description many months ago now - it’s what I’ve put up on the ‘My Novels’ page above. But then I decided it needed some amendment, so that’s part of what I’ve been doing today -It’s taken me ages to complete this version - and I’ll probably want to tinker with it some more tomorrow. For an experienced writer, I’m ridiculously slow, especially at writing short pieces. Here’s today’s version.

Any commments will be welcomed - and when I’ve got two or three versions of the front cover, I’ll be asking for your opinions too - though that’ll be a while yet.

PAPER LANTERNS

Told with insight and compassion, this novel moves between Hong Kong, Norfolk and the Midlands, and shows how the consequences of an act of infidelity have shaped the lives of three generations of women.

After a phone call from her younger brother, Ann travels to Hong Kong in search of the truth about their scandalous mother, Vivienne. Here, she discovers a series of letters and journal-entries which reveal a secret about her beloved grandmother’s early life that challenges her most deeply felt convictions. Ann must also face up to her own part in an event which took place just before her sixteenth birthday, and caused the break-up of the family.

Hong Kong itself, with its exotic mix of old and new in the bustling urban districts, and the quiet charm of beautiful Lamma Island, plays a key part in Ann’s reappraisal of her own life and marriage, and the unexpected dilemma that confronts her.