Carol MaFie Lange is loving life in three different countries

Whatever the bug is that makes people long for new places and experiences, Carol MacFie Lange has a serious case.

Carol, who is promoting her first novel at Cole’s Books in Bicester tonight, has lived a life full of adventure.

There’s been romance, drama both on and off stage – even murder – and travel. Lots of travel.

And at 77 she shows no signs of changing.

“I think, perhaps because of my childhood and background, and the quest to discover the meaning of freedom, the Gypsy in my soul will never die,” says Carol, who spends her life between New Mexico, Spain and Oxford.

Her story begins in Scotland, where she was born and lived until age nine, when her mother left “an abusive, war traumatised husband” and Carol’s two brothers ages 10 and 12.

“If I had known I would never return to the family home, perhaps I would have looked back to etch it in my memory,” she says.

“But I didn’t. It was a bright, early summer morning and the air was electric with tension and a sense of impending adventure.

“The sweet pungent aroma of honeysuckle on the hedges has stayed with me all my life, triggering the memory of this final farewell.

“I would never live with my brothers again.”

For years Carol and her mother moved from town to town, never staying long enough in one place to form close friendships.

“We moved to Norfolk with a man she had met in one of her temporary jobs, and lived there five years,” says Carol.

But although she won prizes at school for poetry and at age 16 was given a scholarship to university in Norwich to study business administration, she was deeply unhappy at home, with an abusive stepfather.

So, she left home at 17 and took an office job in a chocolate factory in Norwich.

“For the first time in my life I felt the sense of freedom and liberation that Gypsies must feel when they take to the open road,” she says. “The whole world lay before me. Free at last! Free to choose, to explore, to write, to exercise my intelligence without fear of ridicule. To be alone. To experience a different kind of loneliness, or solitude.”

And following that there was no stopping her.

After moving to London and working in advertising agencies, she moved to New York.

“I lived in Manhattan for three years until I witnessed a murder and was thrown in jail as a ‘material witness’ although completely innocent,” she says.

“As soon as I could, I took a Greyhound bus all over America, with side trips to Jamaica and Mexico. On the road again, the Gypsy in my soul, endlessly searching.”

That search came to a temporary end in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Carol fell in love and had two daughters – “the lights of my life and my best friends”.

During her time in New Mexico, Carol worked with emotionally disturbed Navajos, and earned a BA Hons in Theatre Arts.

“I worked with wonderful visiting actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Greer Garson Theatre, among them Ben Kingsley, Patrick Stewart and Tony Church,” she says.

Then began her link to Oxford. She moved to the city, played Phoebe in The Entertainer at the Playhouse and various roles at the Taylor Burton Theatre.

She commuted to London for other acting work, earned a post-graduate degree in English/Education at Westminster College and taught English and drama to A-level in various schools in Oxfordshire.

“When the kids flew the nest, I met my second husband Rolf Lange in Oxford,” says Carol. Rolf is a dynamic, energetic Schwabisch German who ran a patisserie there and, like me, had a passion for the sea and boats.”

Time to settle down at last? Not Carol.

Carol with her granddaughter

“We bought an old catamaran and sailed through French canals and rivers to the Mediterranean, taking in jobs teaching English in Greece and theatre production in Germany,” she says.

“We lived on the catamaran for 10 years and sailed up the coast of Spain to Andalucia. There we sold the boat and found an old farmhouse in a village in the Alpujarra mountains of Andalucia.

“We have lived there for 13 years and it was there that the idea for Invisible Child was born.”

The Invisible Child: A Boy’s Survival In Franco’s Spain is the first book of a trilogy Carol is writing after being inspired by people in her Spanish village. She will be promoting it at an event at Cole’s Books in Bicester tonight.

Carol and Rolf are regular visitors to Oxford where her daughter Cristina, a producer for BBC Radio Oxford, and three grandsons, Ricardo, Leon and Oscar, live.

Her step-daughter Juliette, a chartered accountant, lives near the city and has three daughters, Charlotte, Alice and Emily.

Carol with her husband Rolf

“Life in Oxford is enlivening, as always: music, theatre, wonderful bookshops, and Sara Banerji’s very stimulating writers’ group at the Castle,” says Carol, who enjoys all three of the places she calls home. That includes Albuquerque, New Mexico, where her other daughter, president of her own company for bettering women’s health, lives with her husband and children, Atticus, five, and Octavia, three.

“I lived full-time in New Mexico for 20 years. It’s my spiritual home,” says Carol, who also has a stepdaughter (and four step-grandchildren) living in Ohio.

“Living in the three different cultures is satisfying, on the whole,” she says.

“For a start, I get to see the people I love, and share their lives and longings.

“And I love each of the three places for different reasons: the mountains of Spain for the tranquility and peace to write; Oxford for the cultural stimulation; and New Mexico for the diversity of cultures and all that goes to enrich this part of the world with its extraordinary landscapes and beauty. The only real downsides are the expense of travelling, and jet lag.”

But you can be sure that’s not going to stop her adventures.

* Carol MacFie Lange will be at Cole’s Books, Crown Walk, Bicester, for a free event from 6.30pm today. Call 01869 320779 or visit coles-books.co.uk

INSPIRATION CAME FROM THE SILENCE

The Pact of Silence* imposed by the Spanish government, and adhered to by the people, is still in effect.

It took many years of trust and warm friendship to melt the suspicion and pain of the past; to make possible a mutual sharing of experience and understanding.

The people of our village are the most generous and welcoming, humorous and kind that we have ever met in our travels.

We love them and are valued in return, accepted affectionately as their resident “extranjeros”.

They are proud to have a writer in their village writing about them, gleefully pasting a large poster in the bar advertising the first book, Invisible Child.

One of the old men told me tales of the Franco era; the tortures; the disappearances. What he told me moved me to tears. The stories had to be told.

The book is entirely a work of fiction based on historical fact and my own experiences in Spain.

Many of the characters are based on people I know and have met, both democrats and dyed-in-the-wool Francistas.

I needed to hear both points of view. I began to understand why people turned against their neighbours, why certain people in our village, and all over Spain, will not talk to each other still; and why civil war is often referred to as “the worst type of war”, when fear and hunger lead to brutality and betrayal of friends and even of family.

I lived with the idea of this first book for four years, wrote the first draft in three weeks, edited and re-edited and indie published it within six months.

The final writing came like our waterfall above the village, unstoppable in its volition to reach the river below.

I wrote from early morning to evening with a break for exercise and lunch. Now I need to write every morning between 8am and 1 pm. Afternoons are given over to research, reading, exercise, talking and dreaming. That’s in Spain.

The pace of life in that tranquil valley is slow and forgiving. The sun shines nearly all the time.

Rolf writes his poems, plays his accordion, tends his orange, lemon, fig, almond, pomegranate, olive and nispero trees with his trusty friend Max at his side, a curly brown bloody-minded Spanish water dog who loves to frolic in the river that runs through the valley.

The whole series will be called The Alpujarra Trilogy.

First was Invisible Child, a tale of survival under tyranny. Second will be Green on Snow, which tells of the characters’ continued struggle after the civil war and still during the Franco era, their suffering and their struggle for freedom.

The title is inspired by one of the characters, a Scottish painter and a member of the International Brigade who went to Spain to fight for freedom against all odds. (Green on Snow: inspired by the snowdrop, which pushes its way through ice and frozen earth, symbolises hope and the coming of spring, and also death because it is so close to the cold earth).

Third comes Angelito’s Song. Angelito is the baby born to the mother incarcerated in Invisible Child, son of the Beast, Bruno. He is a golden child, a leader on the journey to transition to democracy in Spain. The story addresses the questions of forgiveness and justice... and peace.

Invisible Child has been well received in New Mexico and has sold well (after several book readings/signings and interviews). Friends and family have mixed feelings. Some loved the book and want more. Others are horrified by the sex and violence and couldn’t finish it. It’s not everyone’s glass of sangria!

But I decided at the start not to think of the readers’ sensitivities, but to tell the truth.

The Pact of Silence has never been broken. There are thousands of families who have had no closure, mounds of earth in the valleys covering the slaughtered; judges and others who have been ostracised and hounded from the country for trying to expose the truth of that dreadful war.

Perhaps when I finish this trilogy I can become obsessed with something else. Perhaps…

* Otherwise known as The Pact of Forgetting, this is the Spanish political decision (by both the leftist and rightist parties) to avoid dealing with the legacy of Francoism after the 1975 death of General Francisco Franco, who had remained in power since the Spanish Civil War in 1936-1939. It was an attempt to put the past behind and concentrate on the future of Spain but while many historians accept it served a purpose at a time of transition, there is controversy over whether it should still be adhered to.

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