This week I’m hosting Christine Lindsay with Veiled at Midnight (3 book series digital worldwide), Linda Wood Rondeau with A Father’s Prayer (digital worldwide), and Sharon Srock, Brandilyn Collins, Julie Carobini, Mary Demuth, Robin Patchen with Women of Heart, 5 author boxed set (5 copies if post receives 10 comments US only). If you want to enter the drawing for the book, please leave a comment on your post with your email address. I will not enter you without an email address (my way to contact you if you win). If you don’t want to leave an email address, another way you can enter is to email me at margaretdaley@gmail.com. The drawings end Sunday (September 13th) evening.
Interview with the hero from Veiled at Midnight by Christine Lindsay
1. Captain Cam Fraser, tell me the most interesting thing about you.
That would be the finale to my army career when I was given the prestigious position as aide de camp to Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of British Colonial India. This is an honor that I feel I am totally unworthy of. However, with the consummate example of a godly soldier—in that of my step-father General Geoffrey Richards—I too will give my all to serve King and country, and most of all my heavenly Father. I will stand beside Lord Mountbatten during a time of tremendous upheaval in British history. With the recent ending of WW2, the curtains are drawing to a close on what was once the great British Empire. This is all due to the current loss of India in 1947. That bright and shimmering jewel in the English crown will soon be granted independence, but unknowingly this will usher in the brutal Partition of India and create that new Muslim country Pakistan.
2. What do you do for fun?
Like most British soldiers I used to like nothing better than a rousing polo match. Growing up in India, I played endless cricket matches with the orphans at the mission my parents often helped out at. But as a man, before the recent riots grew like uncontrolled wildfire, I found my greatest pleasure in spending time with the beautiful Indian woman, Dassah. I’ve known her from a child when she was an orphan in the mission, but then I lost touch with her. Only recently, just before The Partition of India began to send millions to the roads as refugees, I had found unspeakable happiness in listening with her to that new jazz music from America, teaching Dassah to dance to that strangely syncopated beat, and in reading together. But then, my newfound sense of joy was whisked away as we British started to leave India, and the country erupted into brutal hostilities. I lost Dassah again. But this time she ran away from me. To my great shame, I realize I am not worthy of Dassah either.
3. What do you put off doing because you dread it?
Acknowledging the fact that while outwardly I appear a success, inwardly I am a failure. My step-father taught me by the purest examples of what a godly man, a godly soldier should be. Yet, I have failed him and my mother, also my sister Miriam, and now the woman I love—Dassah. It is the human frailty handed down to me from my biological father that is cursing my life. To my horror, I am like him—I cannot stop my infernal need for the drink. I am an alcoholic—God help me! With Dassah lost somewhere in the dangerous countryside, I find myself battling the temptation to drown my fears. Even with all my attempts to locate her, no one has seen or heard of her. But then…looking for one woman in India is like looking for a diamond on the seashore.
4. What are you afraid of most in life?
That I will never find her again. That I will not be able to maintain the sobriety I am working so hard for. I’m afraid my human weakness that seems to be inherited through my biology will ultimately separate me from those I love, including God. Is my alcoholism a biological weakness? Or is it simply sin, and I must do what my sister entreats me to do—cast myself at the feet of Jesus and receive his healing?
It is this vile weakness of mine that caused Dassah to run away from me for the second time in my life. In this worn torn country, when death surrounds us, it breaks my heart that she hides herself from me.
5. What do you want out of life?
To be the man of God my parents raised me to be, a man worthy to be Dassah’s husband. I also want to snub my nose at British society that looks down on the Indian people and on inter-racial marriages. I want to wed this dusky woman with hair like dark silk, and show the world that God rejoices in all the skin tones He created—that no one color is of more honor than another.
6. What is the most important thing to you?
Finding Dassah alive in what seems to be this god-forsaken land.
But also my honor. Not that honor which is bestowed by society or through my army career, but the honor that is granted through the relationship I used to share with the son of God. But somewhere along the way—perhaps in this past war—I lost my way.
7. Do you read books? If so, what is your favorite type of book?
At the mission as a boy, I helped my parents teach the orphans how to read. I remember reading The Wind in the Willows to a group of children, of which the little girl Dassah was a part. But when I recently found her again, as a grown woman, before the recent tumult, we had some stolen time together. We read Romeo and Juliet, and I also read to her The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas. The story of the Roman tribune Marcellus when he is banished to the insignificant military outpost of Palestine during the crucifixion of Jesus is a novel that touches me deeply. Soldier to soldier—what will one do with the crucified and risen Christ?
8. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
To keep my oath to God, to remain sober at all times, to be that new man he promised to make of me.
9. Do you have a pet? If so, what is it and why that pet?
As a child growing up in India in a military outpost, I had many pets—a mongoose, several monkeys, my horses of course, and at one time to my mother’s horror, a pet snake. It’s all just a part of being a person living in British Colonial India, a society that will soon cease to exist, and perhaps one day forgotten.
10. If you could travel back in time, where would you go and why?
Back to that time portrayed in the novel The Robe, when that other soldier, that Roman tribute Marcellus stood at the feet of the cross. Like that fictional character I too would like to see the happenings immediately after the resurrection of Christ, when the power of God brings the dead back to life, when He heals all sickness and human weakness, when He heals a man like me who struggles with a weakness handed down to him from his earthly biological father. When God proves with His power that nothing can separate us from His love.
