Waiting For Anya

"Very much so. Again, it has to do with going to a place by accident—not planning it and discovering something remarkable. I have a son who was getting married down in the southwest of France. After the wedding was over, we didn’t quite know what to do with ourselves. We had a few days, so we looked at the map and decided to go to the Pyrenees, simply because I’d never really been to mountains before. I had this childish notion in my head—it is important always to try and achieve your childish ambitions!—that I would stand up at the top of a mountain, with one foot in one country and the other in another country. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There’s a village in the Pyrenees called Lescun. You can walk up a hill, through the pastures, through the woods, and you arrive right up in the high Pyrenees. If you keep walking, eventually you come to a peak where you can place one foot in Spain and one foot in France. We were on our way to put a foot in France and a foot in Spain, but we got lost. What happened was extraordinary: we found ourselves in a village called Bource at the foot of the Pyrenees, and discovered a cage on the green. In the cage was a bear, a Pyrenean bear, called Jojo. Etched onto the cage was an entire story in French about how a little girl had found this bear 15 years before when it was a cub and brought it home. It was quite famous. Incredibly, I was lost but I’d found this live bear in a cage. As we drove to find the village, we came upon a hotel, and saw, first thing, a bear skin on the wall of the hotel. Having just seen a live bear moments before, it had a huge impact. One evening at supper while staying there, this girl of about 10 or 11 walked in carrying a book. She showed it to me—a copy of my book War Horse . She said, ‘My uncle runs this hotel, he said that you were staying here, and I’m just reading this. Could you sign it?’ And then, ‘My daddy wants to know: could you come and have a lunch of paté and wine tomorrow?” So the next day we stopped off for a hospitable lunch with this girl’s father, who happened to be the mayor of the village. He told me that when he was a little boy in 1943, the Germans came to this village to occupy it because they knew that people were escaping the occupation through the mountains. All sorts wanted to escape from occupied France by going over the mountains into Spain—including Jewish children. This village was the last place they would hide out. The Germans obviously got wind of this, and sent a whole group of people to live in the village priest’s house. This boy (now a man, the mayor of the village) told me how kind some of them were. You don’t hear that from many people about occupying German soldiers. He said some would hand out sweets, and sit around chatting in the evening with the old men in the village. They’d all been fighting in the First World War, and there was some sort of strange camaraderie between these old enemies. I was surprised and very moved by his story. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I knew then that I was going to somehow write a book that had a bear in it with a Jewish child trying to escape into Spain. How it would happen I didn’t know—I had no idea at all. I started working out a little bit. Eventually, when we got back home I talked to a relative who had been in the resistance in France about his experience. I also asked the French side of my family who’d also been there during the occupation. The more I learned about it, the more I thought it would be interesting to explore. I knew nothing about being occupied. I suppose I was trying to put myself in the shoes of that child in that village meeting those soldiers. Not to mention the conflict of being part of the secret organization that took these kids across the mountains into Spain. So I wrote the story."