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| BE and AS hamming it up... |
Sometimes in life we meet people with whom there is an instant connection. I have known about Beverley Eikli (or Beverley Oakley) for a long time through the writing circles, but we never really got to talk until we went to the Phryne Fisher Costume Collection last year. Not only did we discover we were both big kids who liked dressing up, but also discovered some of the most amazing coincidences in our lives... beginning with the fact we were both born in the dying days of the colonial presence in Africa: me in Kenya and Beverely in Lesotho and moved to Australia at about the same age (Beverley to Adelaide and me to Melbourne) etc. However what Beverley did, that I have never quite had the courage to do, is return to Africa and her life from there reads like a Girl's Own Adventure.
Beverley and I are doing a shared book launch on June 22nd and all of those (in the general vicinity of course!) are more than welcome to join us for an afternoon of wine, cheese, chocolate, books, poetry and music. (Proceeds will be going to Alzheimers Victoria). Details at the end of the post.
So
many questions I could pose, Beverley, but first let us compose ourselves with
a cup of tea. I have been teaching George Swahili… “Peleke chai kwa Mgeni”
(Take tea to the guest). The question is
what sort of tea is your preference?
Ah, there’s nothing like a good strong cup
of tea, first thing in the morning when I sit down to work. Thank you so much
for having me, Alison. So, tea? I’m a traditionalist and a ‘when in Rome…. ’
sort of person. In Australia it’s English Breakfast with no milk or sugar.
However when we visit Norway, which we do quite frequently as my husband is
Norwegian and I lived there for a year, my favourite is Jul Te or Christmas Tea (pronounced yule, as in yuletide), a fragrant fruit and spice tea, taken black
and unsweetened, which I bring home in large quantities after every visit.
The
reason I mention Swahili is because you and I have a very similar background. I
was born in Kenya and you in Lesotho (formerly Basutoland) during the dying
days of the British Empire. What took your family to Lesotho?
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| BE's grandfather on a survey trip of the Okavango |
Ah, Africa and the good old days…. Well, my
dad, Ted Nettelton, had been born andbrought up in Botswana during the 30s and
40s and had studied anthropology at Cape Town University before he joined the
British Colonial Service. They sent him to Cambridge University to do a
District Commissioner’s Course, and then to the mountainous African kingdom of
Lesotho in the mid 50s where he became a District Commissioner in Mokhotlong,
known at the time as ‘The British Empire’s most remote outpost’. I was born ten
years later during what mum and dad considered the happiest years of their
lives in this far-flung region. Shortly afterwards dad was transferred to the
capital, Maseru, where he took up the post of Private Secretary to the
country’s first democratically elected Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan. We
emigrated to Australia a few years after Independence.
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Garden in the mountains of Mokhotlong in Lesotho
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Your
own life reads like a girl’s own adventure or at the very least the plot of a
romance novel. Again, like my family, yours emigrated to Australia but unlike
me, Africa has drawn you back and that in itself is a story. Can you give us a
potted history of your African adventure?
Thanks Alison… I love telling this story
because it’s a reminder that real-life romance is just as interesting as
fiction. So, how did I end up back in the land of my father’s and grandfather’s
birth, a whole generation later?
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| BE with microlight in Botswana |
In my late twenties I came upon my
grandfather, Gerald Nettelton’s pictorial diary, which details his
extraordinary adventures as a young District Officer between 1916 and 1922 in
the Okavango Delta in Northern Botswana. About that time, an unexpected
freelance windfall gave me the funds to see the country for myself on a fly-in
safari, so I persuaded dad to come along, and we had a brilliant time, the
icing on the cake being a job offer to return later in the year to do two
months relief management at Okavango Wilderness Safari’s luxury camp, Mombo. I leapt at the opportunity and took
leave from my job as a journalist on Adelaide’s The Advertiser to immerse myself in bush life. This was twenty
years ago so communications were basic. There was nothing as sophisticated as
wifi or GPS or fax machines, though we had a two-way radio. Delivering fresh
supplies and tourists to camp was done by light aircraft due to the floodwaters
which turned so many camps into islands for six months of the year, but
those floodwaters attracted vast herds
of game to the area which the tourists paid big money to see. Botswana’s
successful economy is based largely on high cost, low impact tourism, in
addition to revenue from its diamonds which were – fortunately for Botswana –
discovered after they gained independence from Britain. (I later had some
exciting times working in survey in the closed diamond town of Orapa, several
years later, but that’s another story.)
Anyway, back to my own fairy tale in the
pristine, romantic environment of the Okavango, where fate intervened the evening
before I was due to fly home to resume my old life. After dining around the
large table with the 14 guests staying in our small camp, we all convened
around the campfire, and this is when I got talking to the handsome Norwegian
bush pilot who’d just flown in four tourists.
Eight months later, after a whirlwind
courtship consisting of these six hours of conversation around the camp fire,
dozens of long-hand snail-mail letters three faxes and two long-distance phone
calls, Eivind (pronounced Ivan) boarded a flight from Botswana and jetted over
to Australia to ask me to marry him. It’s been a brilliantly successful 20
years, as that was only the beginning of our adventures around the world.
How
has Africa influenced your writing?
I’ve always felt part of me stayed in
Africa, though I’ve lived in many countries and Australia is home. As a child I
wrote childish, dramatic stories about kidnapped earl’s daughters, and, as an
adult, more sophisticated stories of kidnapped earl’s daughters, but a novel
with an African setting has always been something I’ve wanted to do.
A poaching background might have been an
obvious choice due to my having worked in the safari industry. I’d heard so
many stories from Dad who’d grown up in the bush, and hunted for the pot during
boyhood expeditions. Tragically, his brother, my uncle Gerald, was trampled to
death by an elephant in Tanganyika; later, when I worked in Botswana, and then
when I returned once more to live with Eivind in a tiny thatched cottage in the
middle of a mopane forest by a flood plain, I formed a very healthy respect for
elephants, and for the other African wildlife which surrounded me.
However, although I was working and
socializing with pilots who flew for photographic safaris, and pilots who flew
for hunting safaris, and also game rangers, documentary makers and long-time game
hunters, I wanted to set a story in the country where I’d been born during the
final years of the Colonial Administration.
Dad had prosecuted many medicine murders
and Illegal Diamond (IDB) Buying cases in Lesotho, so I decided to make my hero
a bush pilot who becomes embroiled in IDB to save the reputation of the
District Commissioner’s daughter, whom he loves, but who has set her sights on
a more illustrious match: an up-and-coming Cape Town lawyer. In addition to the
dramas of conflicted love and how many risks a man will take for honour,
despite the fact his ultimate goal seems hopeless, I also wanted to explore the
nuances of the class structure amongst both blacks and whites in a country that
has never experienced Apartheid yet which was surrounded by Apartheid South
Africa.
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| The Sani Pass - one
of the world's great mountain passes - was just down the road and separated us
from South Africa. I returned several years ago and remembered all over again
how terrifying it was to negotiate those hairpin bends in a 4x4 |
You
are best known for your wonderful cross genre historical novels (indeed you
write spicy historical under the soubriquet Beverley Oakley). Do you have a
particular period that holds your passion?
I enjoy so many, and I have to admit that
when I set a book in a particular time period, it’s often a good excuse for me
to make a full costume, with all the corsetry and underpinnings to wear in
order to promote it. The two favourite settings for my spicy stories are the
English Civil War (The Cavalier) and
the 1880s during the pioneering years of Photography (Saving Grace). Pan Macmillan Momentum have just included Saving Grace in a bundled collection of
their Hot Down Under series, which was launched a few days ago on May 27th.
And I have to say, that although my Beverley Oakley stories were classified
erotic, most of them were more an exploration into how desperation motivated my
heroines during key historical moments, rather than a celebration of eroticism,
though the descriptions were reasonably explicit, as the heat level of my
Beverley Oakley stories always are.
Your
latest book (and your second with Choc Lit) is THE MAID OF MILAN. What was the
inspiration behind this story?
I worked on this story over many years,
while other stories of mine were published. Honour and redemption are key
themes, as is generally the case with my books. As almost every reviewer
remarks, The Maid of Milan is ‘not your typical historical romance’, and that the
ending isn’t what any of them expected. I love to keep readers guessing and to
lead them to expect a certain ending, but to get another.
I also wanted to explore the issues of
wrongdoing and manipulation, and how far love and forgiveness will stretch. I
agonized over getting the nuances just right in this book and I strove for an
atmosphere reminiscent of the 1944 mystery-thriller movie ‘Gaslight’ starring Ingrid Bergmann. In the beginning of The Maid of Milan, everything at first seems
obvious. The reader knows that Regency party-girl Adelaide has come a cropper
and, following four years of unspectacular marriage, she’s just begun to appreciate
her noble, energetic and reformist MP husband, Tristan, who’s nursed her
through her darkest hours.
Then Adelaide’s former lover, (who happens
to be Tristan’s boyhood friend), turns up, and Adelaide is forced into a series
of lies and counter-lies to hide the secrets of her past, while being thrust
reluctantly into the limelight as the celebrated muse of a famous painter.
But that’s when everything stops being obvious
as, hopefully, the reader grapples with who, in fact, is manipulating Adelaide,
and why? The answers are definitely not as clear-cut as first appears and Adelaide finds herself spiraling into a world
where, despite all her best intentions and efforts to be the woman her husband
deserves, she is trapped, a pawn in someone else’s game.
ABOUT THE MAID OF MILAN
How much would you pay for a clear
conscience?
Adelaide Leeson wants to prove herself
worthy of her husband, a man of noble aspirations who married her when she was
at her lowest ebb.
Lord Tristan Leeson is a model of diplomacy
and self-control, curbing the fiery impulses of his youth to maintain the calm
relations deemed essential by his mother-in-law to preserve his wife’s health.
A visit from his boyhood friend, feted poet
Lord James Dewhurst, author of the sensational Maid of Milan, persuades Tristan
that leaving the countryside behind for the London Season will be in everyone’s
interests.
But as Tristan’s political career rises and
Adelaide revels in society’s adulation, the secrets of the past are uncovered.
And there’s a high price to pay for a life of deception.
Beverley Eikli is the award-winning author
of eight historical romances, laced with
mystery and intrigue.
She has worked as a journalist, magazine
editor, a safari lodge manager in Botswana’s Okavango Delta, and an airborne
geophysical survey operator on contracts around the world.
Beverley loves exploring complex issues
such as the consequences faced by characters who make errors of judgment in a
punitive society. Her own experiences have provided rich fodder for her books,
the highlight of her tumultuous past being the handsome Norwegian bush pilot
she met around a camp fire in Botswana and married after a whirlwind romance,
twenty years ago.
Beverley teaches in the Department of
Professional Writing & Editing at Victoria University. She lives with her
husband, two daughters and their Rhodesian Ridgeback, in a pretty country town
near Melbourne, Australia.
You can visit her website at: www.beverleyeikli.com or follow her on
Twitter @BeverleyOakley or Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beverley.eikli
GIVEAWAY:
It’s been a pleasure to be here, Alison. Thank you. I’d also like to offer a copy of my Regency romantic mystery/suspense Lady Farquhar’s Butterfly to a randomly selected reader who can tell me what year France’s Madame Guillotine beheaded its last victim. (I ask this during my History Through Costume talks, because my last book, The Reluctant Bride, was partly set during The Reign of Terror in 1792.)
AND MEET BEVERLEY AND ALISON:
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