Untying the Knot

UNTYING THE KNOT is a Kindle e-book available from Amazon (£1.90/$2.99)


A ruined castle...
A ruined marriage...
Two shattered lives...
When love is not enough, who pays the price?

SYNOPSIS
A wife is meant to stand by her man. An army wife particularly. But Fay didn't. She walked away - from Magnus, her traumatised war hero husband and from the home he was restoring: Tullibardine Tower, a ruinous 16th century tower house on a Perthshire hillside. Now their daughter Emily is marrying someone she shouldn't. And so is Magnus...

"Everyone makes mistakes, but I sometimes think I’ve made more than most. Marrying Magnus was one of them. But the biggest mistake I ever made was divorcing him."

FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL meets THE HURT LOCKER

UNTYING THE KNOT is my fifth novel and I wrote it after my third, STAR GAZING had become successful, winning one award and being short-listed for two more. I wanted to follow up the success of STAR GAZING as a romantic novel, but I didn’t want to repeat myself. My aim was to write another unusual love story that would make readers laugh and cry, as STAR GAZING had done, but I needed an “angle”.

I’d written about all kinds of love over the years but realised I’d never written much about marriage. I’d also never written about divorce. So I decided my hero and heroine would be a divorced couple. The twist would be, they never should have divorced, because five years on, they’re still in love with each other and can’t move on. That seemed a promising scenario, but I still had to find an interesting hero and heroine (and my readers have very high expectations of my heroes!)

Sometimes these things just fall into your lap. Driving through the Glasgow suburbs one day, I saw a white van parked on the drive of an ordinary house. The lettering on the side of the van said “Bomb Disposal Unit”. My ever-curious brain immediately started asking questions... Was this where a bomb disposal technician lived?... What sort of a man does that kind of job? Then my novelist’s brain kicked in with more questions – interesting ones. What sort of boy grows up to become a man who will dedicate his life to the most dangerous job in the world? And what sort of woman would marry a man like that? And what would their marriage be like?...

The answers to those questions became a novel.

I hadn’t done much research into bomb disposal before learning that the extraordinary men (and a few women) who do this job don’t use the layman’s term “bomb squad”. They refer to working in “Explosive Ordnance Disposal” or EOD. In the trade, this also stands for “Everyone’s divorced” because of the toll the job takes on marriage.

None of my novels has ever come together as a concept more quickly or easily than UNTYING THE KNOT, but strangely, none has taken longer or been more difficult to write!

Restoring Kinkell Castle

Jenny McBain wrote about the restoration of Kinkell Castle on the Black Isle in The Sunday Times, Oct 29th, 2006.

When, in the late 1960s, Gerald Laing (British pop artist and sculptor) first came across Kinkell Castle, north of Inverness, it had been abandoned for decades. That would have put off most potential buyers but, as an artist, Laing had a strong sense of the aesthetic potential of the 16th-century building.

He discovered it belonged to a distant cousin of his, negotiated a price of £5,000, to include a couple of acres of ground, and spent a year working alongside local artisans making it habitable.

…(Laing said) “The point of rebuilding Kinkell Castle was to savour the 16th-century architecture and, by so doing, to understand more of the past and its similarities to — rather than its differences from — the present.” He believes the architecture of the time focused on the vertical rather than the horizontal because of the need for fortification and defence against marauders. The original gun loops that pepper the walls would appear to support his theory.

Doing up such an old building involved much historical detective work. In the course of discovering how the building had been constructed, Laing unearthed information about the circumstances of those involved. For example, the walls of Kinkell were formed using any stone that came to hand. This sort of construction is known as “the random rubble” method and indicates that the clan chief, John Roy Mackenzie — who had the castle built as a family home — was on a tight budget.

… With developers more willing to take on large schemes, suitable projects for individual restorers are few and far between. You’ll need money, time, energy and plenty of patience — dealing with statutory bodies can take ages.

But anyone who has ever stood in a room that was first inhabited hundreds of years ago will know the impulse that drives on the would-be castle builder. Certainly anyone stepping into the great hall at Kinkell Castle, where the television is snuggled in a corner next to an original fireplace marked 1594, will feel their heart yearn to live somewhere similar. There will always be prospectors inspecting piles of stones in Scotland’s remote fields, dreaming of how they can bring them back to life, wondering whether they are looking at their own castle in the air.

POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER & THE FALKLANDS VETERANS SUICIDE TOLL


More veterans of the Falklands War have killed themselves in the years since the 1982 conflict ended than died during hostilities, according to a veterans support group.

The South Atlantic Medal Association say they are "almost certain" the suicide toll is greater than 255 - the number of men killed in the war. The association estimates the total could be 264, according to a report in The Mail on Sunday. Co-founder Denzil Connick blamed the suicide rate on the "stiff upper lip brigade" and a lack of resources to tackle Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. [See MENTAL HEALTH section for more info about PTSD.]

The ex-paratrooper, who lost a leg in the Falklands, said: "Nobody knows the official figures for suicides - that is one of the problems. But we know for sure we have lost an average of 10 veterans per year since the conflict ended. That makes 200 veterans who have committed suicide and that is bound to be a conservative estimate. I am almost certain there will be dozens more that we do not know about and the figure is likely to be more than 255.”

[Source: BBC news item, 13th January, 2002]



Penny Coleman, author of FLASHBACK, is the widow of a Vietnam vet who killed himself after coming home. She interviewed dozens of other women who had also lost husbands, sons or fathers to PTSD and suicide in the aftermath of the war in Vietnam.

She writes: “CBS News contacted the governments of all 50 states requesting their official records of death by suicide going back 12 years. They heard back from 45 of the 50. From the mountains of gathered information, they sifted out the suicides of those Americans who had served in the armed forces. What they discovered is that in 2005 alone - and remember, this is just in 45 states - there were at least 6,256 veteran suicides, 120 every week for a year and an average of 17 every day.”