I grew up about an hour and a half from my grandparents and was lucky to see them often. My grandfather was a big man who pretended to be strict, but was actually soft hearted and indulgent with his grandchildren. He had a large vegetable garden and doted on his tiny dog, Button, who he took to local hospitals to visit patients. He made a famous minestrone soup, handed down from his own depression-era parents, and something called rusks which, by all accounts, came from the war. When he passed away, my grandmother’s house must have seemed very quiet, so she often came to stay with us.

I was a teenager during those years, and my grandmother was petite, talkative, and charming. As time marched on she became increasingly confused, which would eventually lead to an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Early on, she simply told her stories again and again, punctuating them with both laughter and tears, seemingly forgetting that we’d heard them before. Still, I listened. Now I’m so grateful that I did; as the fog of dementia descended on my grandmother, clouding her short-term memory, most of her stories arced back to the war.

My grandmother was a nurse with the Canadian army, which made her a lieutenant on the Western Front. She lived in England before following the army to France in the aftermath of D-Day, working in tent hospitals across Normandy. As the front line moved north into Belgium, my grandmother went with it. There she met and married my grandfather after a six-week romance, which, in my adolescence, astounded me.

“Six weeks?” I’d exclaim, and she’d smile.

“Well,” she’d remark, “It was a different time.”

Listening to her, I eventually came to understand what she meant.

“Normandy looked like the moon,” she’d say of her first months in France, and I would try to imagine it: the cratered land, the bombed villages, the devastation. She recalled the people still living there, surviving amid the wreckage. Sometimes local children were rushed to medical units when they’d encountered the enemy, which occasionally came in the form of undetonated explosives. My grandmother shuddered at the memories.

When she spoke of field hospitals, what often surfaced was her impatience with the mud. It covered everything: the ground, the aisles between cots, the patients themselves. She described filling her helmet with water to give herself a sponge bath, a stolen moment amid the chaos. She remembered the urgency of incoming patients, the way they flooded the wards and were laid outside under open sky when the tents were full.

Her stories about working on hospital trains often revolved around a particular soldier who sang through his journey. He was gravely wounded, yet he sang one song after another as the train rocked through a long, dangerous night.

“He had a lovely voice,” my grandmother recalled, pausing as she folded a pair of pants, her gaze suddenly far away. I tried to imagine it from the other side of the laundry pile: a dying man with a beautiful voice, my grandmother as a young woman tending to him, both of them shuttling through the darkness of a world at war.

She worked in a facial ward in France as well, but she wouldn’t speak of that posting. Her mouth became a tight line at any mention of it, and she would shift to stories of Belgium. There, she and her colleagues, some of whom she wrote to all her life, transformed a bombed-out veterinary clinic into a medical unit. She remembered, with distaste, that there were taxidermy animals mounted on the wall. I imagined the eeriness of their eyes staring down on a ward full of injured men, forever frozen.

While in Belgium, my grandmother met my grandfather, who was a captain with the American army. He spoke far less of his experiences, but the stories that emerged were horrific. When I look at photos of him in his uniform, I recognize the smile in his impossibly young face; it remained boyish until he was an old man, a grin that bubbled up into his eyes. I always found it difficult to imagine his gentle, youthful countenance amid the atrocities of the battlefield.

My grandparents married in the city of Ghent, clad in their uniforms, and my grandmother explained how people threw rice as they emerged from the church. Seconds later, more people appeared, hungry and frantic, kneeling to sweep it up. She once told me this story while we were in her bedroom, and I stood in front of the framed photo of her and my grandfather, smiling in their uniforms, looking both stunningly young and happy.

And that’s what surfaces now, all these years later, as I consider my grandmother’s past: her life in the war involved staggering contrast. Within her memories there was horror and tragedy, yet there were also moments of joy. There was hope and humanity.

I believe the humanity of such stories is what makes them so resonant all these years later. My grandmother sparked my fascination in World War II, especially concerning the untold contributions of women, and so I’ve gone looking for similar hidden tales. Courage, My Love, my first novel, explores the incredible role of women in the Italian resistance. My new novel, The Winter Orphans, follows a group of Jewish refugee children who escaped from Austria and Germany on the eve of war, and the real women who fought to save their lives.

Though these histories are fundamentally different from my grandmother’s experience, some of her words come back to me, again and again, as I write. “It was a different time,” became her refrain, and now I try to imagine all she meant by those simple words.

It was a time when you married the man you loved in mere weeks, because he might not live beyond them. It was a time when soldiers died in the mud, when children lost their families, when home became a memory. And yet, it was also a time of improbable goodness, and unimaginable bravery.

The Winter Orphans is a tale of goodness and bravery, and like all stories of heroes, it’s shot through with hope. The people populating the novel’s pages, and the real figures behind them, accept grave danger in order to save lives. Like my grandparents, and so many other heroes of World War II, they were ordinary people who responded to extraordinary times with courage and fortitude.

Perhaps, like my grandparents, these heroes eventually grew old and obscure. Perhaps they had a tiny dog like Button trailing them in the garden, or a famous soup recipe, or they repeated themselves over and over again as their minds failed. Perhaps the people around them would never imagine what they’d lived through, and never hear the incredible stories spooled in their memories.

This is why I’m forever grateful that my grandmother opened a door to her past and let me look in. She ignited my imagination and my admiration for women like her, with remarkable and unexpected histories just waiting to be found. It is an honor to bring them to life once more.

The post Kristin Beck On Her Grandmother’s Stories appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

We had the pleasure of speaking with debut author Kristin Beck about her novel Courage, My Love, writing, book recommendations, and more!

Hi, Kristin! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?

I’m a former high school English teacher, which was a job I loved, but I always wanted to be a writer! I’m so grateful now that I can spend my days lost in stories. When I’m not writing, I can be found gardening, reading, and exploring the outdoors with my husband and kids.

After the chaos that was 2020, have you set any goals for this year? If so, how are they going so far?

I’m working on my third book currently, which is inspired by the true story of female doctors who established front-line hospitals in World War I. It’s a big, sweeping novel, so after initial research, I began to doubt my timeframe for finishing it by next fall. However, right now the draft is over halfway complete, so it looks like I’m on track! I’ve also set some personal goals after the upheaval of 2020, which mostly involve seeing people I love as it becomes safe, and always appreciating the ability to do so.

Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!

The first book I remember reading is likely not the first book I read! However, I vividly recall reading The Big Orange Splot by Daniel Manus Pinkwater, which is a fantastic picture book. A book that contributed to my dreams of becoming an author was Anne of Green Gables, which I read countless times throughout grade school. A book that I can’t stop thinking about lately is The Invisible Woman, by Erika Robuck. Powerful and gripping, it’s about OSS agent Virginia Hall’s undercover work in France during World War II.

When did you first discover your love for writing?

I have wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, I wrote numerous stories, attended “young author” camps and workshops, and dreamed of publishing a book someday. In third or fourth grade, we were given aptitude tests, which consisted of long bubble sheets of questions meant to predict future career paths. When I got to the end of my bubble sheet and my suggested career was not “author,” I was dismayed. So, I crossed out my result and added a line of my own: “Other – Freelance Writer.” Apparently, I’ve always loved writing!

Your debut novel, Courage, My Love, is out April 13^th! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?

Brave women change the world.

What can readers expect?

Readers can expect a fast-paced, moving story following fictional characters who are rooted in the true, historical events of Rome in 1943-1944. Rome during the German occupation was full of danger, wrought by both the Italian Fascists and the Nazis, and ordinary people summoned extraordinary bravery to survive and resist. This is a story inspired by their courage.

Where did the inspiration for Courage, My Love come from?

Courage, My Love sprang from the intersection of some of my long-held interests. When I was in my twenties, I spent a fair amount of time in Italy, living there first as a student, and later as a visiting teacher. While there, I learned quite a bit about World War II on the Italian front, which I found to be particularly interesting because three of my grandparents served overseas with the Allies. My grandmother, who I was quite close to, was a nurse with the Canadian army, working in field hospitals across Europe. I grew up hearing her stories, and I’ve been drawn to the unsung roles of women in the war ever since. When I first learned about the daring women of the Italian resistance, fighting for a future they could believe in, I was captivated.

Can you tell us about any challenges you faced while writing and how you were able to overcome them?

During the research process, I had to brush off my very rusty Italian to access several online and print materials. I haven’t had the opportunity to speak Italian for more years than I care to admit, so this part of the research was both fun and challenging! Now, I would really love to continue studying the language at some point.

If it’s not too spoilery, were there any favourite moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?

I really enjoyed seeing my characters evolve with the story. It sounds funny, because we create them, but characters tend to take on lives of their own! I loved exploring how both Francesca and Lucia find their strength over the course of the novel, despite the reverberations of their separate pasts. People are so complicated both in real life and on the page, and I love delving into that.

What was the road to becoming a published author like for you?

After years of teaching and writing short fiction in the evenings, I decided that it was finally time to take the leap and try to write a novel. This “now or never” realization hit me when I was home with two very small children, so I began my writing journey in earnest under rather difficult circumstances! However, those early years of writing during naps, playdates, and preschool taught me a lot about economizing time, and I managed to finish a book and sign with my wonderful agent. Unfortunately, that first book didn’t find a home with a publisher. I forged ahead with a second book, and now I’m so glad that I did! That second attempt resulted in Courage, My Love.

What’s the best and the worst writing advice you have received?

The best writing advice I’ve received is to learn to silence your inner editor when drafting new work. It can be very difficult to quiet that interior perfectionist and fact checker, but it’s essential in order to dive into a good creative flow. The worst writing advice I’ve heard is to “write what you know.” To some extent this is true, but I believe it shouldn’t be taken too literally. If I truly wrote only what I know, my stories would all be about English teachers becoming novelists. Also, if we only wrote about our own experiences, historical fiction, for one, couldn’t exist!

What’s next for you?

In early 2022 my second novel will release, which is called The Night of Wind and Stars. It’s a story based on real heroines of World War II, who worked for the Swiss Red Cross in occupied France and, through great bravery and ingenuity, saved the lives of approximately one-hundred refugee children from Austria and Germany. This story is close to my heart, and I’m extremely excited about its publication.

Lastly, do you have any book recommendations for our readers?

Always! Several recent books blew me away. Our Darkest Night, by Jennifer Robson, is another story set in World War II Italy, and it is breathtakingly beautiful. Kate Quinn’s fantastic The Rose Code is one that will force you to clear your schedule! Also, two upcoming books deserve places on everyone’s TBR list: The Social Graces, by Renée Rosen, is delightful and thought provoking, and it comes out on April 20^th. Chanel Cleeton’s The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba, available May 4^th, is absolutely enthralling.

Will you be picking up Courage My Love? Tell us in the comments below!

The post Q&A: Kristin Beck, Author of ‘Courage, My Love’ appeared first on The Nerd Daily.