Seven Maids

An account of seven mothers and their first daughters begins in Slovenia in 1880 with murder and suicide and near-asphyxiation of a new-born in the snow. This true story soon shifts to WW1 when the third of the 'seven maids' is still only a child. Eventually she will experience life under British Colonial rule on the Gold Coast (Ghana) and not much later the outbreak of WW2 while living in South Africa. Germans were enemy aliens in Commonwealth countries. Repatriation to Germany revealed the chaos of 1944/45, the SS, a Terror raid, invading Russian troops. There are unusual insights into the British occupation. DNA mingled from places as remote as Pomerania in Germany Austria(Slovenia) as well as the Lebanon and Wales ends up in three mothers and daughters who are completely British. This book explores 'another' Germany, but above all the gradual change to British-ness. The Author Inge Borg's early life was split between South Africa and war-torn Germany. Later, studying at Cape Town University, she shocked her family by marrying a Lebanese, with whom she lived in Central Africa. It was the sixties; a time of social unrest and emerging African independence. A decade later she escaped to London to become a professional musician. With diplomas in violin and piano and a marriage to an English civil servant she began a new life experiencing the upheavals of independence in Zambia, Kenya and Nigeria; also life in Brazil, Canada and the fall of Communism while in Poland. Meeting the Great and the Good during the 70's and 80's, top artists, musicians and politicians, she eventually found a toe-hold in London, where she has lived with a new partner for the past twenty years.