At the age of three, Geraldine was placed with her older sister in a Roman Catholic convent orphanage in Ipoh, Malaya, while both of their parents continued with their lives. Geraldine was Mark Lanyon’s mother and A Life Unwanted is the working title for the novel that Mark hopes to write based on her life.
Mark, his sister, cousins and aunt have been attempting to pull together the threads of Geraldine and her sister, Marguerite’s, early lives. How did they come to be placed in an orphanage with both of their parents still alive? How did convent life shape them? How did the Japanese invasion of Malaya impact on their cloistered lives? How did they become estranged? How did they re-find each other?
Over the coming years, Mark plans to research the historical context to Geraldine and Marguerite’s story and translate their family story into a work of fiction – he has already deduced that the facts are too painful to relate as a biography.
Mark Lanyon Storyteller 