Revised Origin

Decades after creating the character O'Donnell created a new origin for Modesty to explain how different her origin would have been in the 80's:

Excerpt from letter written by Peter O'Donnell to

one of the list members:

"In 1962, when I first began to create them, it was quite reasonable for

Modesty to have been a war refugee from somewhere in the Balkans.

Thirty-plus years on, it doesn't fit. I can't say that this has worried me,

but about fifteen years ago I thought I would try to work out what origins

I would give Modesty if I had been devising her then, in 1980

instead of 1962. Obviously this was just for my own

satisfaction, as there's no way her past can be rewritten now, so

this isn't for general publication but if you thought it might

interest your internet friends then you're free to pass it on.

I'm sending a copy with this letter."

signed

Peter O'Donnell

How it could have been...

Written by Peter O'Donnell

A well-to-do Hungarian, with his wife and eight-year-old

daughter, fled their country penniless in the mid-seventies to

escape arrest for political crimes. In the mountains of

Transylvania, trying to reach Turkey by remote ways, the parents

were attacked by a pair of mentally deficient peasants who had

been banished from their village -- a small, isolated and

incestuous community. The peasants claimed that these strangers

were vampires, and slaughtered them in horrible fashion.

The child escaped, but shock at what she had seen brought total

amnesia. She had no memory of her past, her parents, her name --

anything. She was simply a small living organism trying to

survive. And survive she did, living on whatever she could find

or beg or steal, becoming more adept as the months and years

passed, and moving ever south, always keeping clear of towns,

running from trouble when she could, fighting like a wild-cat if

cornered; her weapon, one she had fashioned herself by binding a

long nail with wire to a handle of wood. After four years the

child-with-no-name was an experienced survivor. In that time she

crossed Turkey and Syria, and spent more than a year with a tribe

of nomads, working as a goat-herd. But at twelve, and soon to be

regarded as a woman, she knew she would have to wear the Moslem

veil, and so she moved on and came at last to a camp for

Displaced Persons. It was here that she fell in with a small,

gentle old man who had once been a professor in Budapest until,

like her parents, he had been forced to flee from political

persecution.

He called himself Lob, and the child loved him for his gentle-

ness. She took to protecting him with snarling ferocity if

others tried to rob him of his meagre food ration, and thus a

strange friendship was begun. After a while they left the squalor

of the camp together. She stole a donkey to carry their few

belongings, and in the years that followed they roamed for

thousands of miles around the Middle East and along the whole

North African coast.

By now the child no longer feared towns and cities, where good

pickings were to be found, and soon their belongings included

books and paper and the tools of education, for Lob knew

everything in the world and the child was desperate to learn. It

was Lob who with a chuckle gave her the name "Modesty". She

chose "Blaise" for herself, after Lob had told her the legend of

King Arthur and his magician, Merlin, whose tutor had been called

Blaise.

Lob spoke five languages, and over the years of their wanderings

he taught them all to her, insisting that they spoke a different

language each day. Towards the end of this time, perhaps in her

sixteenth year, Modesty developed a fierce ambition to make a

home  for Lob and herself. One day in Marrakesh she decided that

Tangier was a place where it was possible to grow rich quickly,

and so they set out on the four hundred mile trek. But fifty

miles from Tangier, Lob quietly died. She buried him there in

the desert, and wept for the first time in her memory. Then she

walked on to Tangier alone.

Her story from this time on until she wound up The Network, is

touched on briefly throughout the novels.