On June 1940, while evacuation from Dunkirk was taking place in the north, my son was born at Cauderan near Bordeaux; we were part of the exodus which was surging down the roads to the south throughout June, at times under bombs from Italian planes. So begins Gael Elton Mayo’s nail-biting autobiography. Shot at by the Nazis whilst escaping into Free France with her baby son and stateless White Russian husband; boarding a refugee ship sailing from Spain to South America, Gael eventually reaches the safety of New York, only to return to war-ravaged Europe. She writes of bohemian life in Spain in the 1950s and Paris in the 1960s; and describes working with Robert Capa and David Seymour at Magnum photographers - both were killed, in Vietnam and Suez - and with Henri Cartier-Bresson in England for Capa’s brainchild, ‘Generation X’. Her Australian-born father was a renowned industrial psychologist at Harvard. The traumatic impact of being sent away to boarding school aged eight scarred Gael for life. Artist, novelist, journalist and mother, her chaotic life travelling back and forth between America and Europe was beset by financial insecurity, broken marriages, intermittent love affairs and, in later years, recurring attacks of facial cancer. First-hand accounts of World War Two and the fight for freedom against authoritarian populism are ominously relevant to Western democracies today. The Mad Mosaic stands as a triumph of the human spirit over adversity. It is a tale of courage and optimism; survival and hope. SEAMUS HEANEY, OBSERVER - An exhilarating autobiography GLASGOW SUNDAY STANDARD - Few refugee stories outside the Auschwitz range have the peculiar poignancy of Gael Elton Mayo’s. ALASTAIR FORBES, SPECTATOR - A compulsively readable, and often deeply moving account of an unusually careless if seldom carefree life led in a rather crazy cat’s-cradle criss-cross between American and Europe. ELIZABETH LONGFORD, BOOKS & BOOKMEN - I have never read an autobiography like this one. I was hooked after the first half-dozen pages. A mixture of Kafka and Alice in Wonderland. IRISH TIMES - An interesting woman and a cool intelligent writer. BIRMINGHAM POST - Full of lively comment and atmospheric description. COURIER MAIL - Her pen inks the period in brilliant cameos. The pictures show a wistful sense of how much that was simple and good about life has been lost in humankind’s rush towards the end of the 20th century. Her story is a reflection of life as lived by the free thinkers of the period. THE TIMES - The Mad Mosaic has about it something of the disturbing impermanence of life depicted in the film Casablanca. Gael Elton Mayo (1923-92) was the youngest daughter of a pioneering, Australian-born professor of industrial psychology at Harvard. She married a white Russian during World War Two, when she was seventeen, and nearly died of puerperal fever after giving birth to their son during the bombardment of Bordeaux. They eventually escaped from war-torn France, recounted in her first novel published by Doubleday, New York, when she was twenty. As a writer she had five more novels published and three volumes of autobiography & memoir; as a painter she had nine exhibitions; and as a singer-songwriter she appeared on TV. She endured numerous facial cancer operations in the later years of her life.
