Guest editor - Heloise Mezen
Nov. 2nd, 2017 01:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charlie_cochraneI'm delighted to say that several of my fellow Call to Arms authors will be guesting at my blog over the next week, and doubly delighted to say that my first guest is our editor, Heloise.
What inspired your involvement with Call to Arms, Heloise?
It wasn't exactly inspiration! I had joined some of the editors and authors from Manifold Press at a writing retreat weekend in Devon - here, which I thoroughly recommend - and one evening the talk drifted to future plans for anthologies. When someone (it may even have been me) mooted a WW2 anthology, the next question to arise was "Who'll edit it?", at which point I either forgot the great Forces motto "Never volunteer" or failed to step back fast enough, because the next thing I heard myself saying was, "I don't mind doing that."
I thought I probably could, because I had edited a volume of short stories by friends before (The Bodleian Murders) but it was quite a big leap taking on a collection where there were going to be some authors I knew, and some I'd never met and am never likely to.
So here, some considerable time later, we are. Although I will say, that if it wasn't inspiration that got me involved with Call to Arms, it was certainly inspiring being involved with it: the blip of excitement when a story came in, and then the team-work: the bigger excitement of working with the authors to get the story as good as they could make it, the great mystery ("What the heck can we call it, then?" - at one point we had a dozen possible titles lined up ... ) - and of course the satisfaction of finding the perfect cover and of seeing the whole thing come together thanks to the team. Wonderful!
Do you have a family connection to WWII?
Where shall I start? Both my parents were from south-east London and both were evacuees. My mother was not yet two when the war started, and because she and one of her brothers were so young (Arthur was five) they and their mother were evacuated to South Wales (Gilfach Goch) together. I went there in the early 90s to look around, and found someone who'd been christened in the same church as my mother and I were - he'd stayed on after evacuation and eventually married a local girl. Mum's Dad was in the Navy, on counter-mines duty in the north-east, based at Rosyth. My father was evacuated first to Surrey and then to South Wales (Llanbradach). His father was called up into REME (Royal Electrical & Mechanical Engineers) when he was 40, in 1940, and thereby hangs a bit of a family saga which I won't go into at the moment .... Dad's Mum spent most of the war as a VAD nurse with a mobile unit, going in to bombed houses and looking after casualties. I know that on one occasion she had to go to a bombed school where 38 children had been killed, but I know that from my father: Grandma never spoke about it.
Mum's dad in all his jaunty glory!
Is there a local connection in the area where you live to WWII?
Let me take you on my daily 10-minute commute by car ... once out of my close and into the road, at the next T junction I am facing the shore establishment HMS Sultan, which was RAF Gosport during WW2. Turning right and left and right again, along the next road I pass Bay House School, which was a wartime base for the Royal Engineers. Left at the roundabout and along Stokes Bay where, if the tide is out, it's possible to see one of the concrete platforms built for the Mulberry Harbour launch prior to D-Day. A couple of minutes later I pass the end of Jellicoe Avenue, which is so wide these days because it was originally built to take a double line of tanks, again in preparation for D-Day. Nearer the site where I work, on one side of the road was the Royal Naval Physiological Laboratory, where some - can't be too polite here - really rather bonkers scientists investigated the effects of underwater explosions, mostly using themselves as guinea-pigs - and on the other side is work. The library I curate is housed in a Victorian mansion which was taken over by the Admiralty in 1939 and used as a nursing home for the WRNS staff at HMS Dolphin, the RN Submarine Service base down the road.
Heloise Mezen has been immersed in words ever since she learned to read, which was before she went to school. Under her real-life name she had her moment of glory twenty years ago when her second book was shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, and nowadays she contributes to the ... and other Oxford Stories series as part of the Oxford Writers' Group, of which she was a member for many years. She works as a (possibly the only) rare books librarian for the Royal Navy, and enjoys researching her family history - Mezen is her great-grandmother's maiden name - and eating too much chocolate.
What inspired your involvement with Call to Arms, Heloise?
It wasn't exactly inspiration! I had joined some of the editors and authors from Manifold Press at a writing retreat weekend in Devon - here, which I thoroughly recommend - and one evening the talk drifted to future plans for anthologies. When someone (it may even have been me) mooted a WW2 anthology, the next question to arise was "Who'll edit it?", at which point I either forgot the great Forces motto "Never volunteer" or failed to step back fast enough, because the next thing I heard myself saying was, "I don't mind doing that."
I thought I probably could, because I had edited a volume of short stories by friends before (The Bodleian Murders) but it was quite a big leap taking on a collection where there were going to be some authors I knew, and some I'd never met and am never likely to.
So here, some considerable time later, we are. Although I will say, that if it wasn't inspiration that got me involved with Call to Arms, it was certainly inspiring being involved with it: the blip of excitement when a story came in, and then the team-work: the bigger excitement of working with the authors to get the story as good as they could make it, the great mystery ("What the heck can we call it, then?" - at one point we had a dozen possible titles lined up ... ) - and of course the satisfaction of finding the perfect cover and of seeing the whole thing come together thanks to the team. Wonderful!
Do you have a family connection to WWII?
Where shall I start? Both my parents were from south-east London and both were evacuees. My mother was not yet two when the war started, and because she and one of her brothers were so young (Arthur was five) they and their mother were evacuated to South Wales (Gilfach Goch) together. I went there in the early 90s to look around, and found someone who'd been christened in the same church as my mother and I were - he'd stayed on after evacuation and eventually married a local girl. Mum's Dad was in the Navy, on counter-mines duty in the north-east, based at Rosyth. My father was evacuated first to Surrey and then to South Wales (Llanbradach). His father was called up into REME (Royal Electrical & Mechanical Engineers) when he was 40, in 1940, and thereby hangs a bit of a family saga which I won't go into at the moment .... Dad's Mum spent most of the war as a VAD nurse with a mobile unit, going in to bombed houses and looking after casualties. I know that on one occasion she had to go to a bombed school where 38 children had been killed, but I know that from my father: Grandma never spoke about it.
Mum's dad in all his jaunty glory!
Is there a local connection in the area where you live to WWII?
Let me take you on my daily 10-minute commute by car ... once out of my close and into the road, at the next T junction I am facing the shore establishment HMS Sultan, which was RAF Gosport during WW2. Turning right and left and right again, along the next road I pass Bay House School, which was a wartime base for the Royal Engineers. Left at the roundabout and along Stokes Bay where, if the tide is out, it's possible to see one of the concrete platforms built for the Mulberry Harbour launch prior to D-Day. A couple of minutes later I pass the end of Jellicoe Avenue, which is so wide these days because it was originally built to take a double line of tanks, again in preparation for D-Day. Nearer the site where I work, on one side of the road was the Royal Naval Physiological Laboratory, where some - can't be too polite here - really rather bonkers scientists investigated the effects of underwater explosions, mostly using themselves as guinea-pigs - and on the other side is work. The library I curate is housed in a Victorian mansion which was taken over by the Admiralty in 1939 and used as a nursing home for the WRNS staff at HMS Dolphin, the RN Submarine Service base down the road.
Heloise Mezen has been immersed in words ever since she learned to read, which was before she went to school. Under her real-life name she had her moment of glory twenty years ago when her second book was shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, and nowadays she contributes to the ... and other Oxford Stories series as part of the Oxford Writers' Group, of which she was a member for many years. She works as a (possibly the only) rare books librarian for the Royal Navy, and enjoys researching her family history - Mezen is her great-grandmother's maiden name - and eating too much chocolate.
