On October 16,
2018, Francine Olnay was driven in twilight along
this road to Craggam Lodge, an elegant house by the
side of river in County Mayo, west of Ireland.
This narrative
carries on from Chapter 3 of MRS ARMSTRONG AND THE
TRAP OF TECHNOLOGY.
In this, the
fashion photographer, Bill Wright, finds, in Paris,
a print of Francine half nude.
It might be the
model Francine who has been photographed many times,
some of them when naked.
Except that it is
not Francine. It is a woman in the 1930s who looks
just like her. And that woman turns out to be her
grandmother. The grandmother was known to Francine
as Sonia Olnay. This was someone different, a Miss
Sykes who became Mrs Armstrong.
How Francine went
from this photograph to the west of Ireland is wound
into the main Mrs Armstrong narrative.
This is designed to
give Mrs Armstrong's concerns about technology a
contemporary perspective.
And it deals with a painful aspect of underground
work -- how this affects the family of someone
living in part secretly.
Francine's
grandmother was, effectively, both parents to her
after her real parents abandoned her. Then she
discovers in Ireland that Sonia had been Nathalie
until she was 31 and the birth of Francine's mother
who was, for ever, bitter that Sonia lied about the
father. |