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Troubador Publishing Ltd - Maggie Allder

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102 pages

English

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Prolific political author, Maggie Allder, returns with her latest novel Living with the Leopard. Following on from Courting Rendition (Matador, 2015), Maggie combines political awareness, adventure and a profound but non-dogmatic spirituality as we follow the story of a newly married couple.Life looks promising for Carrie and Tom even though they belong to a religious organisation deemed 'extremist' by the right-wing government of their day. They belong in a stable community and are, to some extent, sheltered from the poverty and discrimination which surrounds them. However, all that changes when the couple are invited to take part in activities to help the hungry-activities considered subversive by those in authority. Soon, they find themselves out of their depth, subject to a raid from the dreaded ATTF (Anti-Terrorist Task Force). They find themselves involved in the 'overground', the escape route organised to help dissidents to get away and go on to shelter a wanted person in their own home. The situation worsens when Carrie becomes ill and is threatened with total benefit cuts because her behaviour is considered feckless, and the couple can no longer tell whom within their community they can trust. Their faith is challenged and their marriage is threatened by the stress. Eventually, escape seems to be the only option, but they need to get away and take a gamble on who they can trust... This book will appeal to those who enjoy political and suspense fiction as well as fans of Maggie's previous work.

Sujets

Political

Adventure (Guyana)

Politics

Adventure

War

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	10 septembre 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781785896989
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Copyright © 2018 Maggie Allder
The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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ISBN 978 1785896 989

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

To Richard who is the brother I never had, to my dear friend and travelling companion Jack, and to all those family members and friends who have given me so much support as I have learnt to live with my own particular leopard.
Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 1
The year we were married was the year they banned the wearing of white poppies, and carrying a bouquet of white tissue paper poppies, made by young friends from our community as my wedding flowers, was our first act of defiance as a married couple. It was also a little unusual. In our community, which prizes simplicity, it is not normal practice for the bride to carry flowers at all, nor do we dress in white. Even the most serious and elderly of our community turned a blind eye to my flowers, though. White poppies have been important to us for well over a century and we were smarting about this new ban, as about many other regulations.
Tom and I had met in the community. I was brought up by parents who took me to Meetings every Sunday, and to national gatherings every year. My childhood was rich in sleepovers, in night walks to study the stars, in older friends who smiled benignly at my first clumsy attempts at articulating my growing awareness of a Light within and who called me formally ‘Charity’ instead of the friendly ‘Carrie’ my parents and peers used. It was a childhood of shared lunches sitting in the Meeting House garden while my parents discussed politics and social issues with the parents of my friends, and we children discussed programmes we had seen on our DeVs, which is what we all called any Wi-Fi devices, and sometimes problems with school. Education was already a bit of a challenge for children from our community by then. We learnt to keep our mouths shut when teachers extolled the virtues of the New Alliance or when members of the ATTF, the Anti-Terrorism Task Force, came in to talk to us about radicalisation. Tom’s upbringing was very different, far more conventional even to the extent of going to Summer Camp in Maryland two summers in a row. He started coming to Meeting when he was at university, and when he was received into membership his father especially was horrified. They have never really accepted me.
With the help of my parents and various other people from our community we bought a house at the bottom of town. It was old, in a Victorian terrace backing onto the river, and in need of much repair. Mortgages were pretty much impossible to get at that time without a reference from someone in authority, and there was not a chance of us obtaining such a thing. It was, of course, part of the programme to prevent ‘undesirable aliens’ from ‘colonising’ England, but people like us got caught up in it. In response, our community started offering interest-free loans to allow its young people to buy their own homes. Of course, homelessness was a huge problem by then. It still is.
Tom was working in a place in the centre of town, a shop that provided photocopying facilities, but which also printed local magazines and all sorts of documents. His parents thought the job was beneath him and no doubt if he had not belonged to our community he might have done better, but he liked it there: he could walk to his work from our house and his work colleagues were fun. I had trained to teach but as I would not take the Oath Against Extremism I could not be allowed alone in a classroom with vulnerable children. Instead I was a teacher’s assistant and that suited me too. It was undoubtedly less stressful than taking full responsibility for thirty or more little individuals, and for the first two years of work I was assigned to the same teacher whom I respected enormously and worked with comfortably. Of course, I knew he was obliged to report on me regularly and I was extremely careful in what I said to the children or in the staff room. Coming up through the school system had taught me to be quiet while discussions took place. People thought my silence was a reflection of the way we worship, which is usually without speaking, but of course it wasn’t. You should have heard us younger members of the community discussing things when we were sure we were safe!
The house needed a lot of work, and we were doing improvements piecemeal, as time, money and skills allowed. We extended into the roof early on and the bedroom and bathroom up there were clean and fresh even when the rest of the building seemed like an absolute tip. We planned to get the bulk of the work done before we started a family although Tom said, and my parents agreed, that with a house the age of ours you have never really finished.
Our community does not treat marriage as a rite of passage because we try to avoid anything that tends towards differing status. Each life is to be lived as we are guided to live it, and there is no virtue in being married or single, young or old, educated or not. Even so, when Tom and I married I did feel as if there was a slight change of attitude among those who were at that time in leadership among us. There are no rules about what the Jews call ‘marrying out’, but I suppose that two people from the community married to each other meant that there would be less stress, fewer difficult choices about allegiances to be made. For example, they would perhaps not have asked Tom if he would like to be involved on the night soup runs if his young wife had not also been a member of the community, especially after all that trouble a year or two earlier. It would have been asking a lot.
As it was, Derek approached Tom only about a month after our marriage. We had gone, as was usual for us, to the earlier Meeting. It was a bright spring morning with buds just appearing on trees and bushes, and crocuses planted in circles glowing their gold, white and purple colours on public land around the city. The Meeting had been quiet, with one simple ministry towards the end. I have no memory of who ministered or of what was said, but I remember the familiar peace that sometimes engulfs such Meetings, a sort of calm joy. Afterwards we went back to the Meeting House for coffee, past the crowd of homeless people who always gather on Sundays for the toasted sandwiches and coffee which the warden and her helpers prepare.
Derek started the conversation. I was never really sure if I liked him, but he worked hard for the Meeting and indeed, he had been one of the ones who had started the soup runs when we heard that the Feeding Station had been closed down.
“There seem to be more people here every week,” he commented, as we walked past a row of scruffy-looking men standing around eating their sandwiches.
“Yes…” Tom sighed. “I see kids in doorways in the High Street when I walk to work sometimes, but it isn’t really safe for them. I heard that the shopkeepers douse them with water if they find them there, and the police arrest them for vagrancy.”
Derek was frowning. “They say the homeless are not being responsible, that they have made bad choices, but I don’t know – I mean, what choices do they ever have? If they try to help themselves it always ends up with trouble.”
This is a sore point in our community. Derek was probably thinking, as I was, of the events of a few years previously. Homeless people had started to camp on one of the city parks and members of our community had tried to help them. I never knew the whole story – it was not discussed in front of us and in those days I went to the Young People’s Meeting for Business rather than the adult group – but I picked up bits and pieces of what happened. I know they started a school and I think it was very radical, so that quite quickly the ATTF got involved and a group of people was arrested and eventually left the area. There were rumours and newspaper reports at the time of deportations and maybe worse, but it is impossible to know the truth about such things. Nor am I quite sure the group which was involved was all from our community. We have never been averse to working with other like-minded organisations, and I did hear that some of those who were arrested came from a completely different religious group. My parents say they fear the worst; they knew several people who were either arrested or who vanished at that time, and they do not think they were dangerous radicals or terrorists.
Anyhow, since then we have had to be even more careful. We have never stopped serving food and coffee to homeless people from the doors of the la