A SPRIG OF WHITE HEATHER AND A SCOTTISH LASS

Reflections of a Scottish woman who left her home at age 20 to forge a new life in France.

Angelo was born in Invergordon, Scotland, in 1913. This first volume of a two-book memoir, compiled from the author’s rediscovered manuscripts, recalls her life from childhood through June 1939, when she returned to Scotland to visit her mother. Her father, Joe Angelo, a respected manufacturer of handmade precision parts for cars and engines in the Highlands, was a crude, bitter man. Her French mother, conversely, had been raised in a refined, wealthy family. The couple met at a motor rally in Bordeaux. Joe, a handsome mechanic riding second seat, was a rogue who, the author writes, swept the young woman off her feet. They married only weeks later. Joe thought he had found his fortune, until he made clear he expected to live off his wife’s wealth. Angelo’s mother was then disinherited, and her father exacted his revenge by allegedly inflicting unrelenting cruelty upon his wife and children. The memoir’s first half emotionally recounts appalling episodes of brutality. “I was about six when I first got frightened of my father,” Angelo writes. “We thought he was going to kill us all.” But there are also tales that exemplify the resilience she and her younger brother developed, qualities that would serve her well when she was hired as a governess by a wealthy French widower. She moved to Lille, in northeastern France, and the change of locale results in a simultaneous change in the memoir’s narrative tone. Angelo’s prose becomes more buoyant, infused with excitement and growing confidence. Her detailed descriptions of her new home, a grand, palacelike house, are vibrant. Taken under the wing of the children’s maternal grandmother, she ably navigates the lifestyle of the upper class, building skills critical to her survival in the coming chaotic years. And her unique experiences in France prior to and during the Depression and the first years of the gradual German invasion offer an upfront portrait of the looming historical catastrophe.

An intriguing period piece that requires reading the sequel for the complete story.