Spotlight on Liz Harris, author of Darjeeling Inheritance (The Colonials)

 

Darjeeling, 1930

After eleven years in school in England, Charlotte Lawrence returns to Sundar, the tea plantation owned by her family, and finds an empty house. She learns that her beloved father died a couple of days earlier and that he left her his estate. She learns also that it was his wish that she marry Andrew McAllister, the good-looking younger son from a neighbouring plantation. 

Unwilling to commit to a wedding for which she doesn’t feel ready, Charlotte pleads with Dan Fitzgerald, the assistant manager of Sundar, to teach her how to run the plantation while she gets to know Andrew. Although reluctant as he knew that a woman would never be accepted as manager by the local merchants and workers, Dan agrees.

Charlotte’s chaperone on the journey from England, Ada Eastman, who during the long voyage, has become a friend, has journeyed to Darjeeling to marry Harry Banning, the owner of a neighbouring tea garden.

When Ada marries Harry, she’s determined to be a loyal and faithful wife. And to be a good friend to Charlotte. And nothing, but nothing, was going to stand in the way of that.

 

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 LIZ HARRIS

 Fun Facts

(Stuff you may or may not already know!)

Researching a novel, whether through books and the internet or going there in person, can throw up things you never expected to learn or see. The following are five fun things that I learned through research of one sort or another, so, as I know them, they are things about me, albeit indirectly, as well as items I thought interesting/amusing.

Cobras do not enjoy being waved in the air!

This is something I learned when researching what happened to the man who became the manager of the Darjeeling tea estate at which I’d been planning to stay.

One of the manager's duties was to catch snakes, and he would do this with his bare hands.

You needed to have a pretty strong stomach to do this as there were a number of deadly species on the estate. Unlike me, though, the manager had never had any fear of snakes.

As illustration of his lack of fear is that when he was thirteen, he picked up one of the most venomous Indian cobras, a naja naja, jumped on to his 250cc motorcycle and drove away at speed, all the while waving the cobra high above him, its hood flaring. 

Unsurprisingly, the cobra didn't enjoy being waved aloft, and it bit the boy's left hand.

It took two and a half months, but with great skill, and extensive skin grafts, the doctors managed to save most of the boy’s hand.

I learned, therefore, that if one sees a cobra, don't pick it up - run!!

 

Crossing the road in Hanoi.

Anyone who's been to Vietnam will shudder at those words. To cross the road in Vietnam is to take your life into your hands. And nowhere more so than in Hanoi.

When I set off from the hotel on my first morning in Hanoi, I almost immediately encountered a wide road, along which sped an endless stream of motorcycles. They spanned the width of the road and were no respecters of signals.

Panicking, I glanced at my map, seeking an alternative route, one with narrow, almost empty roads.

But instead of a route, I found advice about crossing Hanoi roads.

This is what my map advised.

1.  Look around you at those waiting with you to cross the road.

2. Go and stand next to the oldest Vietnamese person in the group. 

3. The minute the person starts to move, move with them, no matter how risky it seems.

Do exactly what they do, and above all, NEVER STOP WALKING, no matter what's heading directly for you. And before you know where you are, you'll be safely on the other side.

The reasoning behind this advice? 

If a Vietnamese person has lived for that many years, they know exactly how to cross the Hanoi roads in safety!

 

A wealth of pepper

I used to have no idea how very valuable pepper was in the past. It was so valuable that it was equated with gold. As far back as 408AD, the Visigoths demanded a bounty in gold, silver, and PEPPER to call off their siege of Rome.

Spices, like pepper, preserve food, and they also give an acceptable taste to food of an inferior quality and can mask the stench of decay. After a bad harvest, or during a cold winter, the one thing that kept starvation at bay was heavily preserved meat—meat preserved by salt or by pepper.

Therefore peppercorns, because there were never sufficient, came to be so valuable that they were used as money. Rents were even paid with peppercorns, hence the origin of ‘peppercorn rents.

When the Mary Rose, an English ship that sank in 1545, was raised from the ocean floor in the 1980s, nearly every single sailor was found to have a bunch of peppercorns on his person. This was because the easiest way to carry your wealth with you was in the form of peppercorns. 

It rather makes you look at the black peppercorns in your grinder differently, doesn't it?

Both in Cochin (now called Kochi) and in Vietnam, I saw peppercorns growing. But pepper plants are neither trees nor bushes - they're vines that are trained to grow around a strong upright post or a slender tree trunk. From a distance, however, rows of peppercorns growing look like rows of trees.

To the right of the picture below, there are lines of pepper vines growing. (I don't remember the sky being as green that day!)

 

Twenty-four hours for tea

 

Amazingly, from tea bush to auction house, the whole process - from the plucking of two leaves and a bud, to the sending of packed crates to the auction house - takes a mere TWENTY-FOUR HOURS!

The pluckers, who are always women, look for tender new shoots that are small and a light bright green, and they pluck only the first two leaves and the terminal bud. The leaves are then taken to the factory on the plantation, where a precisely timed production process is set in motion as soon as they get there.

Twenty-four hours later, the leaves have been withered, rolled, fermented, dried, sorted, graded, and packed, and are in foil-lined crates on the way to the auction houses.

I found it amazing that the whole process could be completed within a single day.

Soaring to heights undreamed of

 

I went to Egypt a few years ago, and took a week-long cruise down the Nile. On the second evening, the table at which I was sitting, at which there were six people, was approached by the boat’s captain, who asked if we wanted to go in a hot air balloon over the Nile in a couple of days at sunrise. The others agreed. I immediately declined.

 

I can’t do heights, I explained. I couldn’t even get to the observation platform of the Empire State Building, or to the first stage of the Eiffel Tower. I can’t even go up tower blocks. I’m frightened of heights, I said weakly.

 

The man opposite me, whom I knew to be a pilot, leaned forward and asked how I’d got to Egypt. I flew, I told him cheerfully. And being up in an aeroplane isn’t a height, he asked mildly.

 

I’m not often reduced to silence, but I was this time.

 

I stared at him open-mouthed. I love flying. But he was right – you don’t get much higher off the ground than that. So why wasn’t I afraid in a plane?

 

He explained that the difference was that when you’re in a plane, you don’t have any physical link with the ground. In a building, you do. It’s that physical link that causes the reaction of fear. He assured me that I’d have no problem going up in a hot air balloon, and I bought a ticket.

 

He was right. It was magical. The sun was slowly rising above the Valley of the Kings as we drifted across the Nile. I gazed down the whole time, looking at the tops of trees and at the roofs of houses, and I didn’t have a moment’s concern.

 

Having said that, I still prefer being closer to the ground or on water.

 

 ¸.•*´¨)✯ ¸.•*¨) ✮ ( ¸.•´✶

Liz Harris

Born in London, Liz Harris graduated from university with a Law degree, and then moved to California, where she led a varied life, from waitressing on Sunset Strip to working as secretary to the CEO of a large Japanese trading company.

Six years later, she returned to London and completed a degree in English, after which she taught secondary school pupils, first in Berkshire, and then in Cheshire.

In addition to the ten novels she’s had published, she’s had several short stories in anthologies and magazines.

Liz now lives in Oxfordshire. An active member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Historical Novel Society, her interests are travel, the theatre, reading, and cryptic crosswords. To find out more about Liz, visit her website at: www.lizharrisauthor.com

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