Interesting other people

Isabella Blow

My friend Issie Blow took me on many memorable adventures through the world of high fashion (a thoroughly alien habitat) and since her death the world has been a perceptibly less colourful place.

One of Issie’s great qualities was her tremendous enthusiasm.  Thoroughly conversant with the darker side of the creative life, she offered boundless encouragement to many artists, writers and fashion designers. 

I was lucky to be among them.

Madame Lise Graf

When she was 19, Lise Graf told her parents she wanted to study acting at the Conservatoire in Karlsruhe.  She was living in the French province of Alsace-Lorraine, which had just been annexed to form part of Hitler’s third Reich – and she didn’t end up going to acting school. 

Instead, she joined the French Resistance; was caught by the Gestapo, threatened with torture and imprisoned.  She attributes the fact that she avoided the death camps to her extraordinary physical resemblance to the daughter of a senior SS officer – and to her refusal to crumble before the Nazi judge who tried her.

Three days after Madame Graf’s trial, an attempt was made to assassinate Hitler and orders were given for all political prisoners to be shot.  Because her sentence of life imprisonment had already been passed, she survived to enjoy a distinguished acting career and to help me understand the experience of my character Frank McAllister in The Lighted Rooms. 

Mr. Bob Stanton (aka Archie Borman)

I met Bob Stanton when he was a resident of St. Wilfrid’s Nursing Home in Tite Street, London, while I was beginning the research for The Lighted Rooms.  Bob had read The Drowning People and Us and offered to help me understand the realities of life in an old age home.

Over the course of many long conversations, we became great friends.  I learned about his experiences as a schoolboy in the 1930s and during the Second World War.  He told me about London in the 1950s and 1960s, and responded to my questions with great cordiality and openness.

Bob died shortly after I finished the first draft of The Lighted Rooms – but not before he had had a chance to read it. 

I miss him greatly.

My mother, Jane Mason, met Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu during her days as an anti-Apartheid activist in 1980s South Africa.  I met him in 2003, when I asked him to become the Patron of the Kay Mason Foundation.
 
The Archbishop has been an inspiration and a committed supporter.  Like me, he believes that South Africa needs a generation of leaders who understand the problems faced by ordinary citizens, and who will be strongly motivated to do something about them. 

To hear him discuss the KMF in his own words, CLICK HERE. 

When I decided to put commodities broker Eloise McAllister through a nail-biting professional crisis in The Lighted Rooms, I wanted the metal in question to be more interesting than copper or gold.  I chose osmium for its rarity, toxicity and strength, and was lucky enough to be able to discuss its properties and industrial potential with one of the world’s leading authorities. 

Professor John Klepeis is a ‘theoretical and computational condensed matter physicist’.  He is also an extremely generous, urbane and intelligent man who helped bring the dramas of the laboratory to life for me.

If you want to know anything about the application of ‘first-principles all-electron density functional and semi-empirical tight-binding techniques’, he’s your man.

Mr. Mbiko, whom I met while visiting the family of a KMF Scholar in the rural areas of South Africa’s Eastern Cape, was born in 1910.  Though 98 years old when we met, he was as energetic and lively as someone 40 years younger.

Moligiui started work on the gold mines outside Johannesburg as a boy in the 1920s.  By 1960, he had had enough of working underground all day in the searing heat, and left the city for the countryside. 

When I asked him whether, as a little boy, he had ever imagined living this long, he said: ‘I never knew.  There’s no one my age now.  No one.  It’s only me left.’  At which point another friend asked him if he had considered marrying again.  ‘Oh never!’ Mr. Mbiko exclaimed.  ‘A young wife will only flatter me and steal my money!’ 

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