Family rescue story of love and war
Roderick Fry is a respected New Zealand designer, who has worked in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Shanghai and now lives in Paris. For the last 20 years he retraced the route taken by Vincent Broom, his maternal grandfather, across China during the Second World War to rescue his wife and children in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong. A Message for Nasty is the result — an historically accurate novel based on this incredible story of love and war.
Roderick Fry appears in an event at the Auckland Writers Festival on Sunday, August 28, 2pm followed by a public book launch at 3.30pm at the Aotea Centre.
You describe your grandfather as a ‘Kiwi’, where was he from?
My grandfather immigrated to NZ with his family from Liverpool, England, when he was about 4, and they settled in Gisborne. After my grandfather rescued his family, he brought them back to Tauranga where my mother and sisters went to school. In Tauranga there's still a large statue of the virgin and child in the Catholic church that was ordered by my grandmother from the Vatican as part of a promise she made in her prayers during the moments she most feared for her own and her children's lives during the occupation.
This book took you 20 years to write. Why was it so important to you?
It's a project that was very important to my mother and her sisters — they adored their father, so initially it was for them. As I got into it though, I discovered how emotionally rich the story was, and that it conveyed a lot of the of values and types of human experiences that I think are universally interesting.
A Message for Nasty is such a powerful love story. Did you set out to write it this way, or were you more interested in its aspects of war?
My grandmother was Portuguese Chinese and, in these cultures, ‘family' is the foundation of everything, and for my grandfather the love of his children and wife was just a natural part of his DNA, and this prioritisation really linked them together. In writing the story, in reading their letters and notes, and revisiting their family photos, their love, the love that motivated them to take such risks for each other during the war, is apparent everywhere. I think that they both felt extremely lucky that the other had chosen them to fall in love with.
Do you see yourself as an historian or a novelist?
I think there's a third category that might be attached to this book, and that's as the work of a ‘raconteur'. I've effectively taken other people's stories, and then filled in gaps and details using my own experiences and devices to help the reader visualise and sense the story better.
How have your family members reacted to the book, especially those who are featured in it?
There have been a few tears brought about by things that they've learned for the first time, and that have only come out or been clarified by other research and cross referencing that I did.
Your family’s rescue is so extraordinary, it could so easily have not worked out. What qualities do you think your grandfather and grandmother possessed that made it possible?
A fundamental, right-to-the-bone sense of family love and responsibility to see that the other members are protected and don't suffer is part of it. But also, so much of the help they received from others came from how they lived and how they'd treated people before the occupation. There were cases where favours and goodwill were simply being returned, but there were also many instances where people sensed automatically that they were dealing with decent people. They sensed that they were helping someone with a very righteous cause, and that if they did things like lend my grandfather money when he most needed it for his voyage, that they knew they'd get it back, and they did.