Josephine Jules Andrews: “I keep my family’s memory alive by writing”

THERE is joy in the eyes of Josephine Jules Andrews. On the surface it may seem easy to explain she is a devoted mother and daughter, an award-winning ecologist and anthropologist and a talented writer.

But there is so much more. For 11 years she has lived with a grief of such magnitude it could easily have consumed her.

The woman who won the coveted Whitley Award for her conservation and ecotourism work in Madagascar has been slowly rebuilding her life. In 2001, heavily pregnant, she rescued her mother and seven-year-old daughter from a house fire which took the lives of her husband and two small sons. A week later she gave birth to their second daughter.

Now a full-time mum and a carer for her 81-year-old mother who has Alzheimer’s, Josephine has never before spoken publicly of that night or of the anguish it brought: “It was as if grief rendered me mute,” she says.

Today, for the first time, she talks to The Sunday Post about her monumental loss, her struggle back to some kind of normality, and her new found “passion and voice” in writing. As the sole “custodian of memories” for her mother, daughters and lost boys, she is writing a memoir of their lives together.

Josephine, who lives near Carnoustie in Angus, says: “At the time of the fire there was a clamour for the story. But that was not the story, the story of their lives, my daughters’ history in Scotland and Madagascar. I didn’t want any of their lives to be defined by the fire.”

After 10 years working in Madagascar, Josephine and the man she had met there, the love of her life, Mohamed Jules, 29, were forced to leave their successful and ground-breaking project to conserve the rare black lemur. They returned with their three children to the UK in 2000 following a devastating cyclone which ripped through their island home and resulted in Josephine losing the baby she was carrying. Battered by the experience, they moved in with Josephine’s mum in Carnoustie, and bravely began to adjust to a new life together in Scotland. They were blissfully unaware of what was about to befall them the very next year.

In the early hours of Sunday, August 19, 2001, a ferocious blaze broke out in the family home. While Josephine led her mum, then 70, and daughter Rosemine, 7, to safety, Jules went back into the burning house in a desperate effort to save their little boys, Zily aged four, and Isiaka, six.

They didn’t make it out alive.

Reliving that night, Josephine says: “I got mum and Rosie out and my husband went upstairs to save the boys. It was smoke inhalation. It was so quick.”

“To have three people die at once was so extreme,” she adds.

“And the kind of death that they were there one day, happy and laughing, and gone the next it seemed unbearable.”

She and Jules, a talented musician and mechanic, were profoundly in love after meeting in 1991 when he joined the lemur project. Josephine tenderly remembers: “Jules and I fell for each other completely.”

After the fire she faced the stark reality and agonising emptiness of his loss, and that of their boys.

“I remember wishing I had Jules to help me grieve the loss of the boys, then wishing I had the boys to help me grieve the loss of their father. You feel helpless when someone dies,” she says.

“Even more so as a parent if your child dies.”

“Yet there is something you can do. You can share, and keep alive the memories of them.

“After the fire I felt a great responsibility as the only person alive who knew their stories, our daughters’ history.

“Later, when my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, it seemed even more important to keep these memories safe. ”

And so she began to write. The first piece she wrote was about the night of the fire.

“How do you write a story if you do not write the light and the dark?

“My first line was Jules’ voice: ‘God! Help Us!’” she remembers.

“It was in my head and I wrote it down and I kept writing until I had written the whole story of that night.”

“It was as if I needed to write about the very darkest thing before I could have the luxury of writing anything else.”

With encouragement from Esther Read’s evening class and later Kirsty Gunn’s Creative Writing Programme, both at the University of Dundee, she went on to win runner-up in the Dragons’ Pen event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2010 for her yet to be published memoir. “Gradually,” she says, “I regained my voice through writing.

“The memoir is a mix of love and loss, life and death, and joy and grief. It explores the workings of memory, the role it plays in shaping us, and what happens to us when it is missing.”

And here is an extract of her writing:

Time slips and I am flying in my own Africa. Jules and I are in a small plane flying from Mahajanga to Antananarivo. Our clothes are crisp and clean; we are ready for the city. The world we have just left falls away. We see the sea, the town, the minuscule people, the red earth. The forest reserve is tiny, and its inhabitants go about their business without us. As I look down, I imagine the lemurs curled up under the camouflage net of lianas, the geckos catching butterflies, and the giant red millipedes moving about on the forest floor.

Then, I am at Ampasindava, floating just above the coral in the warm water. My ears are under water but I can still hear the

children running and splashing and laughing on the beach. My eyes are closed but I can still see the blue sky and green trees behind them, and the light on the water around me. In the trees, an infant lemur leaps, wobbles, reaches, then jumps back onto his mother. Jules calls: “Avia anareo! Efa pare sakafo!” (“Come on you lot! Supper’s ready!”)

Three, two, one. I’m back in Scotland in my mother’s sitting room. “Remind me, who’s your youngest daughter?” she asks.

“Jasmine, Mum”

“Oh yes,” she says, “Jasmine. How old is she?”

“She’s six now”

“Oh yes. Is she Kikuyu tribe”?

“No, Mum, but she’s half Malagasy”

“Oh good! Has it got something to do with this?” (Waving a Jaffa Cake)

“Well yes, that’s a Jaffa Cake and Jasmine loves those”

“Oh yes. What is it called?”

“A Jaffa Cake.”

“Oh yes, a Jasmine. I’m glad that’s sorted out”

Writing about her past while caring for her mother and daughters means the whole family are included in Josephine’s writing. It was her daughters and her mother who gave her immediate reason to recover her life.

She says: “Having Jasmine a week after the fire helped me enormously.

“I remember thinking at the time: ‘Thank God I’m pregnant.’

“This new life was so important. Jules and the boys live on in her and in Rosie.”

“It takes a lot of emotional energy. It is an extraordinary experience, but there is something profoundly life-affirming about writing.”

She hopes her work when it is eventually published may help others with their grief. That one day they too will be able to enjoy the rich and cherished memories of those who have passed. She recalls: “There is magic from two cultures in my writing, yet ultimately this story emphasises the underlying humanity and emotions common to us all.

“We really were a very happy family.”

That happiness lives on in the Jules Andrews family.

“You have the excruciating pain at the beginning and then there is this gradual realisation that all is not lost,” says Josephine.

“After the fire I would sit on the sofa with the baby and her big sister watching TV and I would feel the whole family was there. You are conscious of this constancy of being.”

She adds: “It is knowing how blessed you are, knowing how lucky you are to have had that life, and now, for me, knowing I am so fortunate to have my daughters.

“The boys are gone, but we, the girls, are living and we have to live our lives for them as well as for us. We have to live our lives in colour and not in black and white and to celebrate our whole family.

“My memories of Jules and all of our children are like their gift to me. My gift in return is to try and conserve some of them in writing.

“My gift will never be as great as theirs but as the Malagasy say: ‘This is only half a pot of honey but my heart fills it up’.”

For more information on creative writing at Dundee University and to read Josephine’s work visit dundeewrites.wordpress.com/