This year, I am planning to publish a book which has been a very long time in the making. It's inspired by the experiences of my father during the war: he was one of those who didn't get away at Dunkirk. He was captured on the way there, and was a prisoner of war for five years. It's called An Ordinary War.
Like many - probably most - survivors of war, he didn't talk very much about his experiences. Eventually, he began to tell a few stories, mostly funny ones. Towards the end of the last century, when I started writing seriously, I began to write some of them down. We would sit by the fire drinking whisky - me with ginger, him with water - and he would talk about things that happened in the forests of Poland all those years ago. Often, the stories were the same ones repeated: just sometimes, his face would darken, and he would say something that hinted at grimmer truths. Once, we were talking about eating - he always ate hearty meals, but never snacked, never put on weight. He said something to the effect of: "You don't know what you're capable of until you've been really hungry." And then lapsed into silence, clearly remembering things that he wasn't going to talk about.
Some time after he died (in 2004), I decided I wanted to write a novel based on his experiences. Because the books I was writing were for children and young people, it seemed natural to aim it at young adults. I soon realised that there were massive gaps in my knowledge about what had happened to him, and I began to do research. I'm not a trained researcher, I'm not an academic - I have a degree, but it's in English, not history. So it was an exploration, perhaps, rather than an investigation.
And it was fascinating, and immensely rewarding.
I will write more in future posts about this process, and how the book eventually took shape. But in this one, I just want to tell you about one little thing - the thing that, if I was trying to be poetic, I could say fanned what was a spark into a flame.
I knew that at the end of the war, Dad had ended up in a camp called Fallingbostel, in north-western Germany, from which he was liberated and then repatriated. In a wonderful book I read called The Last Escape (by John Nichol and Tony Rennell), I came across a picture of several emaciated prisoners sitting on the ground at Fallingbostel, smiling and chatting. One of them looked very much like Dad. The photo was attributed to the Imperial War Museum, so I rang them up to see if they could tell me any more about the men in the picture.
They suggested I should make an appointment to go and see someone there, so I did.
They couldn't tell me any more about the identities of the men in the picture, but they did give me useful suggestions about other avenues I could follow. Their first suggestion was to go to the National Archives in Kew. Every prisoner who came home was supposed to fill in a form, detailing how they'd been treated, which prison camps they'd been in and so on - information which I didn't have.
So off I trotted to Kew, and explained what I was after. The assistant warned me that the records were not complete; everyone was supposed to fill in a form, but not everyone did. My heart sank. A trait I shared with my father was a deep dislike of form filling. There wouldn't be one for him, I was sure.
The assistant produced for me a large folder - I expect now that everything's online, but that wasn't the case then - containing the forms for Dad's section of the alphabet. I turned the pages over carefully, aware that this was a precious resource, not really expecting to find one for Dad.
But then, there it was. Bernard Reginald Course. I hadn't expected it to be in his handwriting, instantly recognisable from all the letters I'd received over the years. And it wasn't just the handwriting. The replies were all brief and to the point, and some were quite brusque. I could absolutely picture Dad, impatient with forms and pen-pushers, wanting to be away, wanting to go home, not interested in making a fuss about what had happened to him. I could almost hear his voice. I stared at the form, and tears came. I wiped them away surreptitiously, and hoped that no-one had seen.
Brief as the form was, it gave me some answers. It told me where he had been. It told me he'd tried to escape, three times, once with his old pal Shep, whom I'd taken him to see a few years before.
And it gave me the urge to carry on, to follow the trail.
No comments:
Post a Comment