My translation of Jacques d'Andurain's memoir, An Odd Mother, has been published and will soon be available from Amazon.

I am proud of my association with this French Resistance fighter who is now 92 years of age and living in a neighbouring village. His family story is a dramatic and at times very bloody one: his father was assassinated when the family lived in Palmyra, Syria; his brother died horribly during the last war and his mother, Marga, was herself murdered in 1948.

Marga d'Andurain was thought to have been a spy and it is certain that she murdered a number of people. Rumours and accusations were published about her for years and, to set the story straight on the subject of her marriage of convenience with a Bedouin camel herder, she wrote Le Mari Passeport a few months before her death.

Given the chance, I would love to translate her book. She married her 'passport husband', while still continuing to live with Jacques's father, so that she could be the first non-Muslim woman to enter Mecca, an ambition she did not achieve. Prison and a harem saw to that.

The Roman ruins at Palmyra are a UNESCO World Heritage site. As a child, Jacques lived in his parents' hotel there and played among the colonnades.