A Family Created by War
We are now almost eighty years past the end of the Second World War and novels from the era remain extremely popular. The need to capture and tell stories about the greatest conflict the world has ever seen is more pressing than ever. But why? There are many reasons, but I will focus on three. First, the men and women who experienced the war as adults, either directly or in its periphery, are dwindling. Those left who own the stories will soon no longer be with us. Many of those who served never wanted to reveal their experiences to family or the public at large anyway, this makes the stories that have surfaced and survived even more special and the need as writers to ‘mine’ the memories of our forebears even greater. Third, we live in an age of great intolerance where our daily feed of social media exacerbates the religious and political fanaticism that is so rife across the world. I believe that by listening to the lessons of the past, passed on through stories that give us a view from both sides of a conflict, we can help tackle intolerance.
Storytelling has always been integral to my family’s life. As children growing up in Hampshire, my sisters and I often listened to stories from the places our parents grew up in – Ireland in my father’s case and Lincolnshire in my mother’s. One story fascinated me more than others. As a teenager sitting at the dinner table in 1980s Winchester, my mother told me the tale of her own family dinner table in the 1940s Kirton Lindsey – the likes of which there cannot have been too many. Around it sat my grandparents, Fred and Miriam Day enjoying Lincolnshire potatoes with my Aunty Mary, a conscientious objector, twice imprisoned for refusing to make bombs; my Uncle Roland, an officer on Algerine class minesweeper HMS Rifleman; and my soon to be Uncle Werner, a former PoW and Luftwaffe camera operator on a Junkers 88, together with my Aunty Roslyn, now Werner’s fiancée and my mother, Josephine. It was gathering brought together through war that would create an Anglo-German family, demonstrating the magnanimity of my grandfather who opened his doors to a Luftwaffe man despite his own experiences at the hands of the Germans as an artillery gunner at Ypres in the First World War.
I realised the significance of this unusual gathering of experiences and viewpoints immediately and recognised that the tolerance and humanity it demonstrated flew in the face of many of the jaded stories during wartime I had seen in films and read in books and comics. Roland, who had served in Royal Navy operations in the Mediterranean in 1942 had joked that his future brother-in-law’s crewmates could easily have dropped bombs on him from the skies above, given Werner’s reconnaissance escapades in the Malta campaign. Werner’s three days alone in the North African desert after the shooting down of his Ju 88 by an RAF Hurricane, and the description of him as ‘quiet, unassuming and cultured’ by the Chairman of Governors at the Lincolnshire school he taught in after the war, said much about his character. These glimpses of the past continued to play out in my head and for years and I became fascinated by my German uncle and knew one day I would write a story inspired by his experiences.
In recent years I was able to reach out to his children and visit Germany to understand his life better and to familiarise myself with the documents held by the family. I understand now what a precious opportunity this has been, requiring a level of curiosity and persistence on my part and the openness and cooperation of my cousins.
What I had already realised then came into sharper focus – we find ourselves on different sides not always because of our choosing, but through political or religious belief systems imposed upon us, perhaps through geography. More than those macro factors, we more often make decisions based upon immediate familial relationships, and the deep running emotions and needs they stir in us, even overriding our rational beliefs and judgement. It is these themes that push and pull so many characters, fictional and real and certainly in my novel, Leaving Fatherland. A greater understanding of our motivations and those of others helps us understand the past and help us decode and prevent the current drive toward polarisation in politics in so many countries.