Guest author - Adam Fitzroy
Nov. 8th, 2017 12:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charlie_cochraneTake it away, Adam...
It’s always a pleasure to spend time with Charlie, but I’m a bit floored by the prompts for this post. You’d think “What inspired your story?” would be easy enough, wouldn’t you? Not in this particular case!
THE TOWN OF TITPU is straightforward. I’ve visited the theatre in Colditz Castle and read about what took place there, and the times ‘theatre privileges’ were withdrawn as punishment, so POW theatricals were the obvious choice - but I can’t tell you now why I ended up choosing ‘The Mikado’ except that I happen to have a copy of this excellent Opera Australia production which got me thinking. SEE’s origins, on the other hand, are mysterious even to me. I toyed with the idea of two officers from opposing armies having a brief fling and then going their separate ways, but there were too many logistical problems involved. (It would have needed more than 10,000 words, for one thing!) With two men on the same side but different ranks it got easier; also there were any number of German convalescent facilities where people were encouraged to swim naked in icy lakes, and that gave me a potential setting. I like the ambiguity of SEE, and the fact that nothing is resolved; there must have be a lot of incidents like that in wartime, when people looked back afterwards and wondered if whatever it was had really happened or if they’d only imagined it!
As for family connections to WWII, though, my cupboard is nearly bare. For A PRIDE OF POPPIES I was able to write about my two grandfathers and eight great-uncles; out of ten men and boys eight served in the First World War (seven in the armed forces, one as an ambulance driver) and one was killed, with one of the stay-at-homes helping to keep the railways running and the tenth still being at school. World War Two is a different matter, though; as far as the eye could see that generation ran only to daughters and boys too young for military service! I had an uncle in the RAF who I think may have been involved in the ‘mutiny’ in 1946 (more research is indicated), but otherwise you have my parents – mother in a reserved occupation as an insurance clerk and dashing home to pull pints in the family pub on evenings and weekends, and father...
Well, my father was red-green colourblind, which ruled him out of military service altogether. He was also in a reserved occupation, being one of many family members employed on the railways. My grandfather was Traffic Manager at Bristol Temple Meads throughout the war, and my father seems to have had a ‘roving brief’ which involved helping out in Traffic Management anywhere from Paddington to Liverpool. His war diary, such as it is, comprises nights sleeping on office floors, lifts hitched on footplates in the early mornings, asking his mother to send him a clean shirt by the 7.15 or the 5.39, and - when he could find the time - roaring around on his motorbike playing the clarinet in various pubs.
That wasn’t all, though. He joined the Home Guard, and that was how he got the biggest scare of his life when he was coastwatching on the cliff. Those who watch ‘Broadchurch’ will be familiar with the churchyard perched high above the sea and the hill behind it; it’s supposed to be in Dorset but – like a lot of Broadchurch – it’s actually in Somerset. My father was coastwatching on the top of that very hill in the middle of the night when he saw a light flashing on and off in the churchyard, repeatedly, in a pattern. The logical conclusion was that it might be a spy signalling to an enemy submarine, which of course was precisely what he was there to look for. Anyway, the upshot was that my dad ended up creeping silently down the hill, slipping round the back of the church and tiptoing across the graveyard hoping to observe the malefactor - he didn’t have a hope of apprehending anybody, because of course he wasn’t armed. It was a bright moonlit night, though, which must have helped.
It’s a lot of build-up for not a very big payoff. When he crept up to the gravestone where the spy was hiding, it was clear there was nothing to worry about; what he ended up apprehending was the lid of a biscuit tin, caught in vegetation and being blown back and forth by the breeze. One might ask if his Morse was all it could have been, and why he didn’t realise it wasn’t a proper signal in the first place, but that doesn’t take away from the courage required to sneak down into a churchyard at dead of night, without weapon or backup, to find out what was going on - and I’m sure the whole war was like that, quiet acts of bravery going unnoticed even by the people involved in them.
So, that’s my one and only exciting war story; in the middle of an otherwise uneventful night, my dad – at the age of about twenty – briefly became this country’s first line of defence (Heaven help us!), and nobody has ever really known about it until now!
Copyright 2010 ThePokerbird/flickr.com.
Imaginist and purveyor of tall tales Adam Fitzroy is a UK resident who has been successfully spinning male-male romances either part-time or full-time since the 1980s, and has a particular interest in examining the conflicting demands of love and duty.
It’s always a pleasure to spend time with Charlie, but I’m a bit floored by the prompts for this post. You’d think “What inspired your story?” would be easy enough, wouldn’t you? Not in this particular case!
THE TOWN OF TITPU is straightforward. I’ve visited the theatre in Colditz Castle and read about what took place there, and the times ‘theatre privileges’ were withdrawn as punishment, so POW theatricals were the obvious choice - but I can’t tell you now why I ended up choosing ‘The Mikado’ except that I happen to have a copy of this excellent Opera Australia production which got me thinking. SEE’s origins, on the other hand, are mysterious even to me. I toyed with the idea of two officers from opposing armies having a brief fling and then going their separate ways, but there were too many logistical problems involved. (It would have needed more than 10,000 words, for one thing!) With two men on the same side but different ranks it got easier; also there were any number of German convalescent facilities where people were encouraged to swim naked in icy lakes, and that gave me a potential setting. I like the ambiguity of SEE, and the fact that nothing is resolved; there must have be a lot of incidents like that in wartime, when people looked back afterwards and wondered if whatever it was had really happened or if they’d only imagined it!
As for family connections to WWII, though, my cupboard is nearly bare. For A PRIDE OF POPPIES I was able to write about my two grandfathers and eight great-uncles; out of ten men and boys eight served in the First World War (seven in the armed forces, one as an ambulance driver) and one was killed, with one of the stay-at-homes helping to keep the railways running and the tenth still being at school. World War Two is a different matter, though; as far as the eye could see that generation ran only to daughters and boys too young for military service! I had an uncle in the RAF who I think may have been involved in the ‘mutiny’ in 1946 (more research is indicated), but otherwise you have my parents – mother in a reserved occupation as an insurance clerk and dashing home to pull pints in the family pub on evenings and weekends, and father...
Well, my father was red-green colourblind, which ruled him out of military service altogether. He was also in a reserved occupation, being one of many family members employed on the railways. My grandfather was Traffic Manager at Bristol Temple Meads throughout the war, and my father seems to have had a ‘roving brief’ which involved helping out in Traffic Management anywhere from Paddington to Liverpool. His war diary, such as it is, comprises nights sleeping on office floors, lifts hitched on footplates in the early mornings, asking his mother to send him a clean shirt by the 7.15 or the 5.39, and - when he could find the time - roaring around on his motorbike playing the clarinet in various pubs.
That wasn’t all, though. He joined the Home Guard, and that was how he got the biggest scare of his life when he was coastwatching on the cliff. Those who watch ‘Broadchurch’ will be familiar with the churchyard perched high above the sea and the hill behind it; it’s supposed to be in Dorset but – like a lot of Broadchurch – it’s actually in Somerset. My father was coastwatching on the top of that very hill in the middle of the night when he saw a light flashing on and off in the churchyard, repeatedly, in a pattern. The logical conclusion was that it might be a spy signalling to an enemy submarine, which of course was precisely what he was there to look for. Anyway, the upshot was that my dad ended up creeping silently down the hill, slipping round the back of the church and tiptoing across the graveyard hoping to observe the malefactor - he didn’t have a hope of apprehending anybody, because of course he wasn’t armed. It was a bright moonlit night, though, which must have helped.
It’s a lot of build-up for not a very big payoff. When he crept up to the gravestone where the spy was hiding, it was clear there was nothing to worry about; what he ended up apprehending was the lid of a biscuit tin, caught in vegetation and being blown back and forth by the breeze. One might ask if his Morse was all it could have been, and why he didn’t realise it wasn’t a proper signal in the first place, but that doesn’t take away from the courage required to sneak down into a churchyard at dead of night, without weapon or backup, to find out what was going on - and I’m sure the whole war was like that, quiet acts of bravery going unnoticed even by the people involved in them.
So, that’s my one and only exciting war story; in the middle of an otherwise uneventful night, my dad – at the age of about twenty – briefly became this country’s first line of defence (Heaven help us!), and nobody has ever really known about it until now!
Copyright 2010 ThePokerbird/flickr.com.
Imaginist and purveyor of tall tales Adam Fitzroy is a UK resident who has been successfully spinning male-male romances either part-time or full-time since the 1980s, and has a particular interest in examining the conflicting demands of love and duty.
