A Foreign Country

Francine Stock

The debut novel of former TV journalist and Newsnight presenter, Francine Stock, looks back at the rounding up and deporting of Britain's Italian nationals in 1940. Fast forward more than fifty years and, Daphne, one of the war office staff responsible for drawing up lists of the most dangerous enemy nationals is being pestered by a young journalist eager to rake up the story and expose the panic and bungling on the part of the war office which inflicted so much misery on thousands of innocent Italians. As one of the Italian victims describes the British policy: "Chaos managed by a race that prides itself on organisation. The worst kind."

Stock, herself a heavyweight news journalist, has little time for TV's appetite for the most simplifed and theatrical treatment of historical events. She doesn't take sides. On the one hand there are the demands of national security in a time of emergency and the importance of judging the actions of others within proper historical context. On the other hand individual Italians were badly treated and opponents of fascism were lumped in together with Mussolini's supporters. There are echos, here, of today's war on terrorism and our current obsession with loyalty.

The war was a time of liberation for many women. Though responsible for a harsh episode (and in the case of one overloaded transport of Italians bound for Canada but torpedoed in the Atlantic, tragic consequences) Stock's Daphnie clearly regarded her 1940 desk job as the high water mark of her life. The intelligence and flair which had seen her promoted so quickly in the war is submerged, after 1945, in conventional marriage and the raising of two sons.

Both sons are ambitious and successful, though the apple of her eye is Oliver, her youngest, a journalist currently covering the conflict in a small, unnamed Russian republic. Via Oliver's experiences in southern Russia we're reminded that judging the rights and wrongs of a situation is hard enough even without a fifty year gap.

As events in Russia force Oliver into rethinking how he is to present a complex ethnic struggle to a TV audience only interested in bite sized chunks, Daphne receives a surprise visit from an Italian survivor. Stock knows how to bring her pot to the boil.