Champs de Mars, Paris
The terrible famine of the early 1970s became a backdrop of our years in France and England, where we lived amidst so much beauty and bounty. Those infants lying listless in their emaciated mothers’ laps became the icons of my childhood.Excerpt from my upcoming memoir Westward Bound: Western Bond
I am constantly surprised that I wasn’t much more affected by these images. At one time, even rock stars were putting them as stage props for their charity concerts. The most famous images are of the infants and mothers. I think I sensed the biblical scale of this famine, and interpreted these images into a distorted Mary and infant Jesus. My young mind relinquished the horror to God (I never prayed about it, so it was an instinctive, intuitive, reaction), where I believed there would be a day of judgement.