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Writer whose life reads like a thriller
Sean Graham went from being a refugee to a war hero, before completing a stint as a filmmaker in Ghana. Now he has written the fascinating story of the ‘Queen Mother’ of the Turkish Sultan’s harem, writes Simon Wroe
The French Odalisque by Sean Graham
Published by Orbach and Chambers
THE film of Sean Graham’s life has not yet been made, but it is only a matter of time.
Separated from his parents at birth, he fled Nazi-occupied Berlin to become the youngest-ever colonel in the British Army at the age of 23 (and surely the only one with a German passport).
When the war ended he brought surfing to Ghana and established himself as the country’s sole documentary filmmaker, leaving only when the President asked him to marry his niece.
Graham has mellowed somewhat since then, but the 89-year-old – now in his third incarnation as an author – continues to gallivant and explore in his works of fiction.
His latest novel, The French Odalisque, follows an historical character with a life even more colourful than Graham’s own.
It tells the story of the beautiful Aimee Dubucq de Rivery, a cousin of Napoleon’s wife, Josephine, who was captured by pirates on a voyage to Martinique in 1784. She was sold into the Turkish Sultan’s royal harem as a slave or “odalisque” and rose in favour to become Queen Mother of the court.
On a visit to Istanbul, Napoleon’s tempestuous general Horace Sebastiani fell in love with de Rivery and the two conspired to flee to Paris.
Whether or not she succeeded in her escape – well, you’ll have to read the book. Little or no information about de Rivery survives.
Graham came across the enigmatic figure during research at the British Library in the early 1990s. She led him to the subject of harems and he realised he had not one but two mysteries on his hands.
“I was stunned to discover there was virtually nothing about the institution of the harem in the British Library,” he says.
“I started to imagine what it would be like to live in a Turkish harem. Most are given by their parents. The sultan inherits the wives of his predecessors; the poor bastard might inherit 30 wives at the age of 60. The thought of having to sleep with all these women at that age must have been terribly off-putting.”
The French Odalisque is Graham’s third novel after the West African political thrillers A Surfeit of Sun and Hippo’s Coup.
A military brusqueness still lingers about him, though it is tempered by an affable humour and wiry grey hair that appears to be slightly electrified around his temples.
He was born Hans Friedrich Hermann Isay in 1920 to a mother who died of puerperal fever during birth. His father, a law professor, married again but his new bride took a dislike to Graham and his sister, the two children from the first marriage, and had them sent away.
They were plucked from foster care by Graham’s aunt and uncle, who fought a seven-year legal battle with Graham’s father over alimony.
“My father kept the money and his name was never mentioned again,” Graham remembers. “I never saw my father; he didn’t exist as far as I was concerned.”
When Hitler’s anti-Jewish legislation came into effect the family moved to England and settled in Hampstead’s Oak Hill Park. A loophole in immigration laws meant Graham was arrested as an enemy alien at the outbreak of war and shipped to a Canadian internment camp; he was 19.
He returned to find the house in Oak Hill Park bombed and his family gone. To escape the German bombers they had moved to the tiny Cornish village of Lelant, only for a German bomber to drop a bomb on their cottage less than three months later. Graham’s aunt, now convinced the Nazis were after her personally, had taken the family to New York.
After studying law at Cambridge, Graham signed up for the war effort: “I was totally convinced I wouldn’t survive. Every book you read about the First World War told you the flower of England was wiped out.
“As a romantic 19 year old student I was convinced I was the flower of England.”
When the army discovered he spoke German he was drafted to a special unit near Bletchley to interrogate German prisoners of war and given three hours to anglicise his name.
“What we were doing was terribly secret. I wasn’t allowed within 50 miles of the frontline or to fly in aeroplanes travelling over enemy territory that could be shot down,” he says.
To extract information, Graham would dress up as a high-ranking officer.
“All armies are terribly conscious of rank. If you had to interrogate a German general, it’s no good turning up as a first lieutenant,” he says.
It was a courtmartial offence, but Graham was so valuable that his superiors instead promoted him to the rank he had faked.
After the war he signed up with John Grierson, the self-professed inventor of documentary filmmaking, and found himself posted in Ghana, then the Gold Coast.
His film, The Freedom of Ghana, is believed to be the only surviving footage of the country’s 1957 independence celebrations.
But after ten years in Africa, Graham was forced to make a swift exit when President Kwame Nkrumah asked him to take his niece’s hand.
He returned to England as a writer.
His first novel, A Surfeit of Sun, is dedicated to his French broadcaster wife, Catherine, whom he married in 1958, with the supplement: “Who thought of it in the first place, and without whose impatience this would never have been written.”
They are still together and have two daughters, now grown up. Graham, who writes for five hours each day after a brisk 30 lengths of his local swimming pool, says: “I shall continue to write until I run out of steam. I don’t think of myself as ‘mature’.
“In my own mind I’m probably still in my mid-forties, which is a great disadvantage as one is constantly disappointed.”
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