Maida Vale 1972 Jacket Cover

Necessary Losses

By Elle L. Childs


Carol Miller is a recently graduated college student invited to London to look after her estranged father’s small flat and his big dog while he is away for the summer. Her divorced father is an American naval communications officer attached to the American Embassy on Grovesnor Square and the year is 1972.

The flat is in London’s Maida Vale just overlooking the slightly down at the heels Little Venice section of the City which has its roots in Gypsy Canal Boat culture: a little shady, a little dangerous but beguiling. Everything looked calm and secure under tree-lined streets, far – so far – from the confused, hazy turmoil she left behind on campus at the end of the Vietnam War.

Carol was anxious to leave the US. Until her 21st birthday, she had lead a quiet sheltered life, raised as she was in the peaceful, upscale Country Club Manor neighborhood of central Denver, Colorado. Her mother had remarried and the oilman stepfather had provided well for them all since she was six. As she began her studies at the University of Virginia in 1968, unrest on campus against the Vietnam War intruded and began to apply increasing pressure on the skillfully charted, carefully mapped future she had chosen for herself. The unrest touched her peripherally and concerned her intellectually but she could not take sides because both sides seemed unsound to her.

But it was the revelation of a personal betrayal that sent Carol reeling. Her mother had kept secret from her all the court battles over child custody and had blocked her father’s visitation rights throughout her childhood. The whole family was aware of or participated in keeping her father from her. All the while, there she was, smoothly gliding on a silken childhood, silently believing her father did not love her.

Two weeks after Carol’s 21st birthday with a postmark date of her birthday, a crate of legal documents arrived from a military address in London and with it a letter from her estranged father. Here was the proof in legal documents and court filings that her father had fought for years and years to be allowed to visit her. The letter said: I love you and now that you are an adult, I am free to tell you so.

Her mother’s betrayal exploded like a bomb in Carol’s life. The debris of her security lay about her like rubble. She had to get away. All around her were strangers to her.

Through the kind-hearted efforts of her maternal grandmother, Carol found respite. Granmama had kept in touch with her paternal grandparents who had soothed their son over the years and had kept him up-to-date with Carol’s progress through childhood. Now, at the threshold of her adulthood, the three of them brokered the plan to send Carol to London where she would be on her own for the summer but carefully – all be it secretly – protected.

But Carol did not know – nor could her grandparents guess – that in leaving turbulence behind, she would stumble into treacherous international intrigues swirling through London’s radical underground.

Who is the puzzling man on the third floor flat of the Regency block house in Maida Vale? Quiet, dark, and commanding. Because her name is similar to his, she is mistaken as the contact for a shadowy confederation with connections to … to what, to whom? Radicals? Anarchists? Terrorists? And she learns a secret that upends her tranquility yet again.

The Olympic Games are set to begin in September. In the spring an airplane taking off from Rome is damaged by a bomb in a record player given to two English girls by two Arab men. In early summer, the son of a British prince dies in a fiery air disaster in the West Midlands. If he had lived, one of the titles he would have inherited was ‘Earl of Ulster’. Ulster, the British name for Northern Ireland.

In the terrorist summer of 1972, against a backdrop of bomb blasts, bloody rampages, upheavals, ghastly terrorist attacks and the bloodiest year in the Northern Ireland conflict, Carol learns a secret about the opening of the Olympic Games in Munich that if not exposed could spell disaster. Or is she mistaken?

Forced to flee, she sets off from the alleys of Notting Hill during festival through the canal network of London with the big dog that will quite possibly save her life if he doesn’t attract the unwanted attention that will get her killed.