A Novel by Bergotte

What follows is my novel GREAT ARE THE MYTHS serialised over the summer holidays of 2026.

Disclaimer:

Great Are the Myths is a work of fiction. While the narrative includes fictionalised portrayals of historical figures including Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, and Cary Grant, these depictions are used solely for the purpose of a creative exploration of 1950s culture and the nature of public mythology. All characters, names, dialogue, and incidents involving these figures are products of the author’s imagination and are not intended to represent factual historical records or biographical truth.

This book is not authorised, sponsored, or endorsed by the estates of the individuals portrayed. Any resemblance to actual events or locales is intended to provide a fictional context for the story’s themes.

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Predestination 

I wasn’t sad to leave old Blighty behind for America. After all, I had been born there in the summer of ’35. My American mother, nostalgic for her bucolic Southern girlhood, wanted me, her only daughter, delivered into the same world she and her mother before her had known. Before she became an English rose, Mother had been a Southern belle: an old-money heiress, or as old-money as one could be in a country like America.

Unlike my older brother, Tom, the golden boy, wholly English in her eyes and part of the great British branch of the family, I was her true-blue cherub. On her bedside table stood a photograph she was especially fond of: me running through the grass on chubby toddler legs in a white cotton dress with a lace collar, taken at the house in Tennessee. That almost-mythical mansion that would, one day, become my home too.

As a girl, I was of no real consequence to her English husband’s family unless I married equal or up, ever less likely, given the King had only daughters. I was also too silly, in their estimation, to marry another duke. I was, in all respects, a child perpetually in the way.

Eventually my maternal grandfather wanted me ‘home’. After the war had taken the light from my parents’ eyes and claimed my darling Tom in the autumn of ’44, Grandpa George stepped in. He offered to take on the responsibility of raising me while my parents, swallowed by grief, drifted apart.

I was thirteen. Grandpa George promised me opportunities I’d never have in a country as old-fashioned as England, where I’d either be married off, serving no purpose beyond the ornamental, or end up a spinster. And then what? What use would that life be? He would not allow me to live a pointless existence, nor one robbed of adventure.

As Grandpa George saw it, Europe was a dying old girl. He knew I was mourning the loss of my greatest ally: Tom, thirteen years my senior and the personification of everything that was right in the world. He had filled the house with fun whenever he was home from school. His absence left a void; the shadows of post-war Europe only deepened it. Grandpa George was right, I could do with a change of scenery. So when he said, “Come to America with me,” I packed my trunk, and said “aye, captain.” 

After some deliberation, my parents let him have his way. I was, after all, not the first-born boy; I was just a girl. That meant I couldn’t inherit the house, the land, or the family name, primogeniture and all that, much to my grandfather’s chagrin. And so it was decided: I would sail back to America with Grandpa George on the Queen Mary. He would change his will again, and this time, leaving me as his sole heir.

I spent the passage to the New World reading Jeeves & Wooster aloud to him, making the old lion roar with laughter, and listening in turn to his tales of a life well lived, stories that filled me with excitement for the path I expected to clear for myself. I was foreseeing the building of my future on the shoulders of his past.

When Grandpa George napped in his cabin, I would take my favourite poets to the deck and ponder the great big everything as I felt the Atlantic cradle us onward into the unfamiliar. I was leaving England, grief, and austerity behind.

I carried Dylan Thomas under my arm, letting him lead me into his world and dance me through his words. I savoured each line, reading aloud from a deck chair, legs under a blanket, wind in my hair, eyes on the horizon, drawn to that vast greenish-blue stretching endlessly forward.

Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily…
And death shall have no dominion.

I read poems from the New World too, delighting in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, poems that told me stories of America herself and, in some strange way, of me as well:

Great are the myths—I too delight in them;
Great are Adam and Eve—I too look back and accept them;
Great the risen and fallen nations, and their poets, women, sages, inventors, rulers, warriors, and priests.
Great is Liberty! Great is Equality! I am their follower;
Helmsmen of nations, choose your craft! Where you sail, I sail;
Yours is the muscle of life or death—yours is the perfect science—in you I have absolute faith.

A week later, we made landfall in New York. Grandpa George took me shopping for my first months in America, whirling between people, places, and things: Saks Fifth Avenue, our suite at The Pierre, dinner at The Colony. The sky disappeared beneath the towers until one afternoon, atop the Empire State Building, it returned, wide and open, stretching to the horizon. The magic in the air carried fresh promise. Beneath it, I could bury my sadness.

After another voyage, this time by train across the vast American landscape, I arrived at that old and familiar mansion in Memphis, prepared for me by Grandpa George. There, with my new American nanny, I stood at the brink of my own Western adventure.

It was to be a great big Odyssey. I exhaled into a new kind of peace as I opened the windows and let the sun into my room.

I had arrived.

Chapter 1 tomorrow. You can listen to the audibook version of the novel on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube.