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Gore Jnr is no fan of the pike (Getty/iStock)
M
y son is afraid of pike. The fish, not the pointy weapon of bygone times – though he might be fearful of both if he knew of them.
I blame myself really. For one thing, having failed to pass my obsession with Arthur Ransome onto my first child, I redoubled my efforts with the next. And it paid off. Tristan will happily watch the 1974 film adaptation of
Swallows and Amazons in the afternoon, be read
Pigeon Post before bed, then listen to an audio version of
Dumitru Tsepeneag’s “Pigeon Post”
Dalkey Archive Press, 2008
The term pigeon post refers to the use of homing pigeons to deliver messages. Perhaps the best known was the French Pigeon Post of the Franco-Prussian War in the late nineteenth century, which allowed messages to travel into Paris across Prussian lines, representing a fluidity between an otherwise rigid divide of East and West. The sometimes difficult task of crossing borders and disseminating information informs the underlying tension of Romanian writer Dumitru Tsepeneag s novel
, translated by Jane Kuntz. Tsepeneag was forced into exile by Ceauşescu in 1975, living in France until the Romanian Revolution of 1989, the same year as the first publication of