Patrick L. Sullivan
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Author Ian Gill speaks to a captivated crowd about a life filled with mystery, tragedy and resilience at the Hotchkiss Library, April 19.
Alec Linden
“You were two sons rolled into one,” Gill told the audience his mother, the Billie of his book’s title, had said to him long ago. “I didn’t know what that meant, and it took me 40 years to figure that out,” he recalled.
The story revolves primarily around Billie Newman, an orphaned child raised by a Chinese-born white British father and Chinese mother who showed up in a basket one day at the couple’s doorstep. Billie went on to work for influential magazine T’ien Hsia Monthly, then as a wartime radio broadcaster, then for top government advisors, and ultimately ran the Secretariat of the United Nations Disarmament Conference until her retirement, for which she was awarded a Member of the British Empire award. This was all despite pressures from the Sino-Japanese War, family tragedy, single motherhood and racism, Gill emphasized.
But the history also carries with it Gill’s own journey of self-discovery, which began with his first visit to Hong Kong with his mother in 1975, when he was a 29-year-old journalist based in New Zealand. That trip, he recalled during a cozy reception for the event hosted by his friend and Sharon local Bill Cowie Sunday evening, “lifted the curtain” not only on his mother’s vast life story, but on the “vanished” China of yesteryear and, crucially, on himself.
“Her story is my story,” he said, “including finding my father at the end – the other half of the genetic jigsaw.”
Billie, pictured right with young Ian Gill, became close with influential journalist and writer Emily Hahn, left, when she worked for T'ien Hsia Monthly in the 1930s and reunited after the war.Photo provided by Gill Archives
The centerpiece of Gill’s book, and of Sunday’s presentation, is the tragic drowning of Billie’s first son, Brian, and subsequent conception of Ian himself, all of which took place during four brutal years living in an internment camp while Hong Kong was occupied by the Japanese between 1941 and 1945.
Brian’s father, an Irishman serving in the British Army, had since left the picture, and Billie spent her years on the internment camp as a single mother.
Gill told the audience that conditions were dismal, with up to 50 people sharing just a few rooms. “The worst thing though were the rations,” he said. “Hunger was a constant problem.”
After Brian’s death, a “cynical journalist,” per Gill’s description, named George Giffen comforted Billie, and eventually she became pregnant again. “Their relations had deepened,” Gill put it wryly.
Gill recounted that his mother revealed an illuminating memory of the grief period to him when he was well into adulthood: “All I could think of was to replace my loss.” Thus, Ian became the two sons rolled into one.
At the end of the war, Giffen returned to a previous marriage in Canada, and Gill would not see him until he was 40 years old, having tracked him down to a remote island in British Columbia. Despite the circumstances, Gill said he and his father grew close for the remainder of Giffen’s life.
Back at Cowie’s home high in the Sharon hills, Gill said that he and his old university friend – the two had met in England over 60 years ago – only realized the previous evening that both had met their dads as adults. Cowie reunited with his father at 21 after not seeing him since early childhood.
“Two boys, him and me, looking for our fathers” was how this story of faraway countries and timelines connects to Sharon, Gill said, since Cowie was the reason he had come to Sharon to tell his story.
Aside from his immediate family, Gill’s research reveals fascinating tales from other pockets of his ancestry, such as his great-grandmother who hailed from a country parish in western England and eventually became a hotelier in a Chinese resort town, and her son, Billie’s adopted father, who developed postal routes in remote parts of China and broke social customs by marrying a Chinese woman. He eventually left her, and the family, for an affair with a Russian woman stuck in China following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
The rest of the details are in the book, Gill said with a smile.
“Searching for Billie: A journalist’s quest to understand his mother’s past leads him to discover a vanished China,” was published by Hong Kong English-language company Blacksmith Books and is distributed in the U.S. by Simon & Schuster. It’s available for purchase online via Amazon and other retailers.
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A quiet moment with Secretariat, and a local Derby Day tradition
Debra A. Aleksinas
Long before the hats, the laughter and the rising hum of voices waiting for the starting horn, there was a quieter moment, one that has stayed with me far longer than any Kentucky Derby Day celebration.
It happened in the mid-1970s, during a private family invitation to Claiborne Farm.
We were invited to see Secretariat — the legendary American Thoroughbred known, somewhat mischievously, for tugging shiny hoop earrings from ladies’ ears.
Decades later, I still remember the anticipation, and then, the sudden stillness as the powerful stallion appeared.
Led from the barn by his handler, Secretariat stepped into view not with the thunder of hooves that defined his racing days, but with a calm, deliberate presence. Up close, he seemed even more extraordinary, his gleaming chestnut coat catching the light, his sheer size and strength unmistakable.
There was a brief moment of instruction, and I realized I was the only one in our small group wearing hoop earrings. Quietly, I slipped them off, suddenly aware of just how close we were about to get.
And then, just like that, I was within arm’s reach of Big Red.
There was no crowd, no grandstand roar, just our family, the handler nearby, and the soft sounds of the farm. And yet, the weight of what he had been**, and what he still was,** felt unmistakable.
This was the thoroughbred who stunned the world at the 1973 Belmont Stakes, winning by 31 lengths in a performance that still borders on the unbelievable.
But that afternoon, greatness was quiet.
It stood in the barnyard.
It breathed.
It watched.
And it let us come close.
That memory returns to me every year around the Kentucky Derby, especially now, as the Northwest Corner prepares for its own celebration.
At the Salisbury Rotary Club’s Kentucky Derby Social on May 2 at Noble Horizons, there will be no starting gate, no Churchill Downs stretch run. Instead, there will be neighbors gathered shoulder to shoulder, creative hats adorned with flowers and flair, a shared countdown to the horn, and the kind of collective anticipation that, for a moment, makes the room feel trackside.
As Rotary Club President Bill Pond has observed, you might think the crowd is actually at the Derby.
But what makes it matter isn’t the imitation of the race.
It’s the purpose behind it.
In small towns like ours — from Salisbury to North Canaan, Sharon to Cornwall — tradition often takes on a different shape. We recreate big moments in ways that are closer, more personal, more rooted in community. The energy at Noble Horizons will not be about wagers or winners, but about something quieter and more enduring: neighbors supporting neighbors.
It is, as Pond describes it, a circle of generosity.
Proceeds from the event ripple outward to local food banks, scholarships, backpacks for students heading back to school, and organizations that quietly meet needs many never see. The celebration becomes something more than a party; it becomes a way of sustaining the fabric of the community.
And that is what brings me back, unexpectedly, to that afternoon at Claiborne Farm.
Because what stayed with me about Secretariat was not just the magnitude of what he had done, but the quiet dignity that followed — the way greatness, once achieved, settles into something steadier, something lasting.
Not loud. Not fleeting. But present.
In its own way, that same spirit carries through Derby Day here in the Northwest Corner — the excitement, the laughter, the hats, the shared moment when the race begins, and the quieter understanding that what we’re really celebrating is connection.
A shared experience. A tradition that gives back.
Secretariat once ran a race the world has never forgotten. And a few years later, standing just a few feet away in that Kentucky barnyard, I learned something else about greatness:
Sometimes, it meets you in stillness.
And stays with you long after the race is over.
Debra Aleksinas is a freelance writer for The Lakeville Journal.