A Strange Fish Swimming in a Foreign Sea

Sierra Leone prior to and post-Independence in the early 1960s, seemed a place of tranquillity to Tim May, just twenty-one years old. He and his companions worked and played hard but Tim was labelled a failure in Freetown, in work and in health and as his manager Mr Enk said, ‘I’m sending you to manage Port Loko branch, you will bloody well sink or swim.’ It was the time-honoured treatment of a failure in the old Empire.Management was a daunting prospect, especially without a knowledge of Bank accounting, but Tim faces the future with fatalistic hope. Immature and wracked by personal problems the prospect is bleak, particularly dealing with the wily, cunning mostly Lebanese customers who grubbed a living thousands of miles from their nation’s internecine wars. It is not only the customers Tim has to combat, but the climate, diseases and general ill health and his mental state, a strange fish in a foreign sea. It seemed the bugs and creatures, the customers, his fellow expatriates and most of all his real persona all combined to defeat him.Tim though is a strong fish swimming amongst predators and escapes to fight other.

Adrienne was born five days after the outbreak of WW2, September 1939. She suffered a difficult childhood, brought up in a village on the North Downs, the chalk uplands that form a line of hills from Dover to Farnham in Surrey. Her village lay due south of the City of London at around 166 metres elevation, not high by any standard but high enough to be cool in summer and cold in winter. It was high enough too, for German bombers to fly over at low elevation, and high enough for the later V2 “Doodle-bug” to cross at perhaps just a couple of hundred feet. One passed by her bedroom window to obliterate a house converted to flats a mile away. Another blew up in the field opposite breaking the house windows. Even so it was not the War that made life difficult but general
inner unhappiness.

She attended boarding school in Cambridge and then in puberty lost her way. At eighteen, she joined a bank, a subsidiary of Lloyds Bank and volunteered to work in West Africa. She did five years’ service in Sierra Leone as a bank manager, suffering dengue fever, septicaemia and a witch doctor’s curse, her adventures there contained in “A Strange Fish Swimming in a Foreign Sea”, to be published in 2023.

Thereafter she first worked for an American food company and then the Civil Service. In 2002, she cowrote a book, Wide Skies, a history of the Norfolk and Norwich Art Circle, to which Sir John Arnesby Brown, Sir Alfred Munnings and Edward Seago belonged.

At seventy years old, she began writing in earnest, at first publishing on Amazon having received several rejections from agents and publishers. She is 83 years old and still tapping the keys.

Novels by Adrienne Nash:

The Quartet. Trudi; ~ Trudi in Paris; ~ Trudi and Simon; ~ Trudi without Simon.

Breakdown

Long Journey into Light

Castle Murkie

The Trials of Sienna Chambers

The Cellar; ~ and sequel, ~ A Time to be Brave

Elizabeth

A Strange Life (Autobiography of the Author)

Tina G

To Love and Love Not

Coming Out