Guest Author - Marianne Wheelaghan

Throwim Way Leg

Literally translated the New Guinea pidgin expression throwim way leg means 'to throw away your leg'. Slightly less literally, it means to thrust out your leg and take the first step of what could be a long march (ie: to go on a journey!). I lived in the Pacific area for nearly ten years and three were spent in Papua New Guinea. At first glance the language seems naïve and downright silly – I can't help but chuckle when I hear it – but for all its apparent simplicity, New Guinea pidgin can be very subtle.

Papua New Guinea is  – after Greenland – the world's largest island and home to 1000 languages, one-sixth of the world's total. The topography is so rugged that until the arrival of aircraft, tribes in adjacent valleys were often completely isolated. Until a few generations ago, some of the  peoples in the highlands mounted well planned raids on villages, kidnapping children and killing (and even eating) their  parents. Under such conditions, to leave the confines of your village and 'go on a journey' was a fearful, perilous thing, rarely done. It meant abandoning the safety of your village, putting yourself at risk of your enemies, without knowing where the journey would take you or if you would ever return to the safety of your village. The phrase throwim way leg hints at that fearful sense of abandonment a tribe's person must have felt when 'going on a journey'.

So what has this New Guinea pidgin phrase to do with being a writer? Well, in the middle of writing my first (crime) novel, my mother very sadly died. While clearing her things, I discovered a bundle of diary entries and letters and documents which related to Mum's earlier life in Germany (Mum never talked about her early life, so the family  knew very little about it.). Now I had a dilemma: did I translate the diaries and letters  (I'd studied German) and reveal all to the family, or did I ignore them and carry on writing my novel? In the end I opted to translate the letters, not least because my dad was driving me nuts asking me to do so. I imagined it wouldn't take me too long. The first thing I discovered about Mum was that she was one of five million Germans to have been forcibly expelled from their homes in Lower Silesia, at the end of the second World War (when Lower Silesia was handed to Poland). I was shocked – I had never thought of Mum as a refugee. I carried on translating and reading. I was horrified. So much so I put the writing of my debut (crime) novel to one side (and everything else I was doing) and carried on until I had translated absolutely everything. Then I began to carry out research.  In fact I didn't return to my crime novel for over four years, not until after the publication of the The Blue Suitcase, a historic fiction, based not just on my mum's life, but on  the lives of all the mums and families of Lower Silesia, Germany, living in the Third Reich.

Why did I suspend one writing project in favour of embarking on another? Because I had to. I think that being a writer is a bit like to throwim way leg every day. More often or not we have no idea where we are going, the trip is full of pot holes, distractions, disappointments and frustrations. There is a good chance we will never, ever return to the warm and cosy comfort of the life we had before becoming a writer and absolutely no guarantee we will ever get to the promised land of  “making it big” (which is what a lot of my writing friends and acquaintances  talk about, despite being  accomplished writers with a number of books under their belt!). But once an idea grips us, we throwim way leg (often along with our sanity) and follow it to wherever it leads us. We are driven, as the King says in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, to “Begin at the beginning and go on till we come to the end; then stop.”  If we are lucky, we will create a story that others will find worth reading and then we'll start all over again.

On the plus side, when we throwim way leg there is very little chance we will ever get eaten :o)

Were you ever so gripped by an idea that you had to stop everything else you were doing/working on to develop it? Are you, like me, looking forward to finishing a writing project in 2012 which began in 2007?

The Blue Suitcase is available on Kindle in both the UK and US  and in paperback in branches of Blackwell's and Waterstone's throughout the UK and in many Independent bookshops in Edinburgh.

BTW:  The Blue Suitcase is a recommended staff Christmas Read at Waterstone's West End branch in Edinburgh. 

(My debut crime/thriller, set in the Republic of Kiribati, is due out in the late summer of 2012 – the working title of which is Murder on Tarawa, but that will most likely change!)

www.mariannewheelaghan.co.uk