A Message to Nasty revolves around Fry’s grandparents, Vincent and Marie Broom, and their children who were living in Hong Kong as the Imperial Japanese Army invaded. Vincent had taken a temporary job in Singapore, so the invasion made it impossible for him to return by normal means.
Fry said recently his own mother had been close to her father, Vincent, and no doubt Fry heard many stories of the war as he was growing up.
“My grandfather made a lot of notes for a ghost writer who wrote a manuscript around the story in the 1970s, but never found a publisher,” Fry said.
“I had these notes, and interviewed my grandmother a few years before she died. I also spent time in China in 1999 travelling along the same route that my grandfather took to get across China to be as close to Hong Kong as he could without being in danger from the Japanese. It was a project he had started in the 70s and she really motivated me to do it.”
The story focuses on Marie and Vincent and their plight. The family has a strong link to New Zealand and Gisborne.
The author’s great-grandfather George was initially a vet in Liverpool, and he and his family moved first to Fiji and then to Gisborne. George was a government vet here from around 1916 to 1935.
Later, as the Depression hit, their son Vincent qualified as an engineer and sought opportunities abroad.
He moved from New Zealand in the late 1920s for work in Asia and set up in Hong Kong. There he married a Chinese woman from Macau, Marie. The couple had four children by 1941.
As Fry delved more into his family’s story and the respective journeys of his maternal grandparents, he said it became apparent to him that the story would be better told as a novel.
“I think I’m naturally attentive to the way people talk,” he said.
“I have some memory of how my grandparents conversed with others, but I also based each character’s speech on similar people I’ve met over the years. It’s a challenging but rewarding exercise to drive a story forward using dialogue rather than just describing events using only my own voice as a narrator.”
And it’s a cracker of a story, as the characters struggle with the immense tide of events that conspire not only to keep them apart, but threaten to eliminate them at the whim of a stray bomb or an order from above. The scenes of Hong Kong’s invasion are taut and distressing, but Fry does not shy away from it.
“I think such a book is pointless if it doesn’t teach the reader, and the writer, something useful for today’s world,” he said.
“My grandfather was someone for whom whānau was vitally important. He got such joy from his children, wife, parents and siblings, and when they were in danger his reflex for self-preservation and patriotism weren’t as important as his family’s wellbeing.
“Also, to use another Māori term, he seems to have carried a lot of mana. Throughout the story there are instances where he does all he can to help others, and he is trusted by complete strangers that any money he has borrowed will be returned. He’d obviously been such a decent colleague and friend to so many people before the war that when he was in need he had no shortage of individuals keen to help him.”
And Fry is not blind to echoes of the story in today’s world. As a species we still don’t seem to have left behind our bad practices of powerful nations marching across the borders of their weaker neighbours and creating chaos.
“On a larger scale, in researching the historical context of Japanese attacks, one can see how delicate international diplomacy is,” he said.
“We can’t support any government that wants to completely crush an adversary. There had been two decades of the Japanese being left isolated on the world diplomatic stage and aid given to its enemies before it attacked Pearl Harbour, Hong Kong and Singapore.”
He contrasts the events of the war with the force the British used to colonise Hong Kong and the fragility of their control over the territory.
“It also contextualises the losses the Chinese suffered at the hands of the Japanese that were far, far greater than those inflicted on those with European origins.”
The book is not a simple writing project that Fry was propelled into by the weight of his family’s history. He said as he was writing it he was able to distance himself from the traumatic events his family went through.
“Maybe it’s a question of ‘time healing wounds’,” he said.
“My mother and grandmother didn’t seem scared by what they lived through. It just seemed to accentuate their natural personality traits and helped them to appreciate life and family more than others. My mother was exceedingly cautious and weary of taking any risks, but her middle sister is extremely brave and strong.
“If anything, the exercise brought me closer to my grandparents, and made me respect them even more.”
As for the book’s title, it’s something Fry is not keen to divulge. You need to read the book to find that out.
“A Message for Nasty” by Roderick Fry is published by Awa Press, Wellington.
