 And you're very welcome back and that was the sound of Judy Collins and my father from her album colors of day And indeed joining me in the studio now I've gotten rid Hennessy and Regina Gibson and we're going to talk about my father's house the latest book by Joseph O'Connor Ladies, you're very welcome. Thank you, Gene So my father's house Joseph O'Connor I read the Star of the Sea a number of years ago and loved it and I was really looking forward to this book and and I think you ladies as well you and Heard an extract from Sunday, Michelle Let me a few weeks ago about how he wrote the book and I thought that that was very interesting, Regina What do you think of that? Yeah, absolutely. I mean it was a very Very accurate account as to why and how he came about it because he was stuck in Cork during COVID and He was climbing the walls and he thought that he would he had come upon the name Hugh O'Flaherty over the years on several occasions and Thought this was the ideal time to sit down and to write a story that would cover Rome and it gave him all this opportunity to know every street in alleyway in Rome Which he could combine into the story of Hugh O'Flaherty So, yeah, no, I thought it was a very nice. It was very nicely done And as the title my father's house you said you copped on to the the biblical reference to that Yes, I think it is in the gospel according to John or something that Jesus says there are many rooms in my father's house And you know in other words that my father's house is a room for shelter and safety and care And this is of course where a father who brought the people that he was helping to escape to the Vatican The Vatican was his father's house as such and other places throughout Rome, you know to say today And I think I read somewhere that that he saved maybe Six and a half thousand or more Jews and prisoners of war from from being killed and many people are alive and families Are here today because of his work. He was a very courageous man extremely brave. I mean he went against Everything of the time because when the Nazis invaded Rome The whole city was closed down and with the exception of the Vatican which was an independent state He could do a certain amount within that confined area, but even the Pope had been directed by the local Gestapo to curtail The movement of the Monsignor and even defied the Pope the Pope kept him indoors for six months But then he was out again Carrying on where he'd left off. He was extremely brave from every side Maria the synopsis of the story we know that he saved people but just what what the story behind the book is about Well, it's just that the father Flaherty was in the Vatican going about his usual work as a priest and a lecture and Then he was chosen to be To visit the prisoner of war camps as an independent observer on behalf of the Vatican He was very reluctant to do that Because him being an Irish man He had grown up here in Ireland where Ireland had been invaded by the British and his experience with the black and tans and all of that And he knew a lot of these prisoners would be you know in British prisoners, but I mean to make a long story short He went along to the prisoner to the camp and saw how badly treated these prisoners were by the Germans And that was the first thing that stirred some feelings in him And then he saw two Jewish people being treated very badly in the streets by the German army and Then a man that he knew brought an escaped prisoner to him and asked him to mind him to keep him And that was the beginning of it He took him in and there started what was called the escape line and really what it was was for the Hugh of Flaherty and The band of friends five or six other people Organising raising funds an order to help prisoners of war who had escaped from prison camps and such To bring them into the Vatican to safety because the Vatican was a two square mile neutral area in the middle of Rome which was taken over by the Nazis and They then went about finding ways of passing them on out of the Vatican on to Switzerland and other friendly countries That's basically a synopsis of it a brief synopsis And of course that's what Hugh of Flaherty is the the central character But there are a number of other characters Interest first with the story as well Regina the choir as they were called the choir Yes there was about eight of them Members of this choir and they met on a regular basis in and in in one of the old convents in the Vatican and They never spoke to each other as such everything was very casual in general and they sang throughout but during the actual Practice father or Flaherty will come around and whisper into each other's ears What information you needed to pass on or give them Notes in which case they had to memorise immediately and destroy them or swallow them or whatever So it was all done very much a cloak and dagger because he was very aware that the Gestapo had ears everywhere And even within the Vatican they had to watch themselves the whole time or they would have been in serious trouble themselves And he also was aware that the head of the Gestapo Was watching him very carefully So but the choir was made up of a mixture of people there was a lady from Ireland by the name of Delia Murphy Who was married? She was a singer in her day but she married a gentleman by the name of Kerwin and he was a senior in the Embassy representing Ireland in Rome and She was one of them up. There were very much a mixed bag of people Another person was a man by the name of Enzo Angelucci and he was a Roman married with children in the city But he had a newsstand in St. Peter's Square and himself and the Monsignor became acquainted through their love of boxing and They would follow the boxing circuit on the radio and then they'd place bets with each other Of course none of them ever paid off, but it was all part of their camaraderie and that's how they gelled There was a gentleman by the name of of Sir Francis Darcy Osborn I think it was who was representing Britain in the in the Vatican and And his sidekick a John May who also came from London and very interesting man who could Get anything they wanted if they wanted boots if they wanted IDs if they want a cigarette if they want to quote that didn't matter he could put his hand on it So he was extremely important to this whole escape operation But there was others as well more aid Yeah, there was well There's two other ladies then yeah There was that Mariana De Vries who was a Dutch lady But I had been born in Switzerland and therefore her passport had to be respected by one and all Throughout Rome so she could pass freely and pick up information and carry information and then there was another lady the Countess Giovanna Landini known as Joe and She'd been married to a count was widowed and just met the Padre as they called him father Lafferty father Hugo who by chance one day and he heard her confession and they became friends and every one of them Came to the group for different reasons You know would be it a political or be it just a do-gooder or be it patriotic or religious reasons And they all brought different things to it. You know you had your army man with his expertise You had the journalist who had free movement and she only came to Rome Wanting to write about the lesser known churches are now two facts around the place and a chance meeting with father Lafferty at the opera one night and then he told her that he would shore around the churches So their friendship had built before the invasion So these people kind of knew each other before the invasion, but it was highly highly secretive wasn't Regina You know I was in awe of the length that they went to be secretive and to organize, you know There was the choir the escapees were referred to as the books The places that they were kept was referred to as the shelves every street in Rome had a name a number Sorry, not a street the choir themselves had code names They had to be that secretive, you know, that's that open play I used to what it's like in wartime in a city The spying and the plants and the thing about the monster cover. Yeah The bar senior also seemed to know every single nuke and cranny and back alley He had studied extensively old maps of Rome in the underground two new places on the ground and caverns and Sort of caves that even the people living in the city didn't know So he was very tuned in into places. We pretty could hide people and how we could get people out of the city He was a very clever man. He'd several doctorates and he spoke five languages It's extremely smart man, yeah, and then of course there was the Gestapo Mr. Brian hot man And he was a real horrible man and he lived the life I mean he had a mansion outside the city Where he enjoyed his classical music Enjoyed fine wine himself and his wife Elsa and the two children just lived as they had picnics and fished and swam and Life was a bliss and yet he was coming home to that as you know as the most horrible person Yes, sometimes washing the blood of his hands from having tortured prisoners. Yeah, what was his favorite instrument was the blow torch He was horrendously cruel and killed people innocent or guilty It really didn't matter and he left bodies sitting in railway stations and hanging from lamp posts and Sitting on benches and parks dead bodies just to show how bad he was and to deter people from You know going against the regime very cruel man And I couldn't help but draw parallels between the occupying forces in Rome and the occupying force in the Ukraine at the moment And how horrible? Soldiers can be to the native population. Yeah It does bring it home to you I mean you kind of forget in peaceful times you forget the horrendous behavior that happens in wars wherever the wars are and Yeah horrible and the structure of the book you had a Piece on say members of the choir, you know a chapter on members of the choir And then you had a chapter then on what was happening the Ren de mento or And then back again, did you think that that worked Maria and Regina? Yeah, well it was a kind of a dual timeline, you know one timeline was set back in 1943 And that was like the thriller part of the book the storyline to the rep de mento which was the performance and then you had another timeline in the 1960s where the members off the choir were being interviewed or Talking themselves and transcripts about what happened or given their version of events And as the book but it was kind of every other chapter one for the 1940s one from the 1960s a little bit Disconcerting the times was Regina a little bit a little bit Yeah, but I actually quite enjoyed the break Because the actual Workings of the Monsignor were so they were quite slow moving. Yeah, they were very intense And there was times he was you were reading and you actually were losing track as to where he was going Whereas so I did enjoy actually getting at this relief of a bit of history on these different people And what they were doing in their lives at that time and how they felt about the whole business So I didn't actually mind it. It's just a good slightly I think somewhere in the middle of the book. I find it a little bit tedious the plot it is it is a thriller a Such it's a literary thriller. So there's a lot of lovely language in it and The plot at the very beginning you hear about this rendimento which is the performance Which is really the big escape that they're planning for the following Christmas and you're going right through the book Waiting on this to happen and it's a countdown, you know So many days and so many hours so many days and so many hours and at a stage you think when is there ever going to happen? Yes, when is this ever going to happen? But when it does it's excellent and I must say right now as Regina says the chapters that are taken from the 1960s Each of them each of the characters when they're speaking They're very interesting and they read very well and they actually there's different language in each of those chapters Which matches the personality of the person who is speaking or reading? You're saying that it's quite intense and one of the things I loved about the book was the humor in it and some of the Terms of phrase like there was a character. I think it's Dalia Kiernan that described him He was a long drink of cross of cross-eyed bucktooth misery if ever there was he bore the snots of a wet horse And anything I think he was so smug that he if he was a banana he would eat himself And then when she was describing he was describing one of the German soldiers Basically that he was as ugly that the tide wouldn't even take about Yeah, just laughed at those things like you know, I thought it was a great turn of phrase and a very very descriptive as well They're lovely just on that some other lovely phrases to when he was describing Dalia Murphy's daughter, you know what to describe in her beauty or something said that she would She would talk rain out of wetting hair Yeah, you know or she would machine gun a room with her beauty and that's what she did to the three German soldiers Should they were kind of dumbfounded by her beauty, you know or in somebody that was left You know that was left for dead he was left for priest and doctor, you know things like that It was nice turn to phrases and another one to you know, the somebody attacked his fist with his face Yeah Just enlightened it and I felt that I could actually Walk around Rome with my good. I could see it I thought it would make a great film because Especially the car chase at the beginning when they were taking the soldier to hospital You could see that happen so so well in your mind He is a very descriptive writer. I mean every nitty gritty's gone into you can visualize it He's very clever. I thought a little bit too much in places When he was going through the church, we heard about every single artifact in that church and one time on a drinks table I just counted he named every one of the nine drinks on the table on the drinks trolley There was one the description of the church I think lasted a page and a half and it was It was in the intense part of the of the book where he was escaping And I don't think in the mood that the man was in the time is trying to escape the just apple through the night But he would have taken note of all everything and of the sound of the sparrow and the rats growing into the manhole Oh, yeah, he was he bit over detailed. Yeah, I agree. So out of 10. What would you give us Regina? I would give it a nine And yourself Maria. Yeah, I would Yeah, I would give it eight and a half. Let's say it eight eight and a half just the lengthy descriptions Maybe it's the one little thing, but I mean brilliantly researched brilliantly described and it does hold you and it's a very good story a true story You know it teaches you facts. It's thought-provoking and it evokes feelings. Yeah, look at your remember Yeah, very much. Yeah, and I think I would give it eight and a half as well The fact I wouldn't give it it may be the nine of the ten is just I felt a wee bit sometimes The the characters in between just took a wee bit away from the flow of the book, but that was a minor detail It was a beautiful book and I would definitely recommend it for people to read it. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely So ladies, thank you so much for taking time out tonight and and as I said, we'll get you back again Maybe in a few months to do another one and as I said many many thanks indeed. Thank you Dean. Thank you We at Highland Radio love Irish music and we want to show