Its coming up to that time of year when Remembrance Day looms large so I make no apologies for repeating an earlier post. Elsewhere on this page is a video clip from the great Henning Mankell containing excellent advice for writers and how they should burn to tell their story. The following is why I burn to tell the story of Loxley:- Every book has its beginning, the seeds of an idea germinating in the writers head that hopefully blossoms into a tale worth telling. Loxleys occurred at the summit of a wooded hillside in Derbyshire, looking across the spread of the valley to Middleton Top and below to where the canal, river and road run parallel. Having walked from Whatstandwell, along the canal and upwards through the deer park, we usually stop here to take in the view and eat our sandwiches. Certainly, there can be no serener setting for the monument erected nearby in memory of the local men who gave their lives in the Great War. I always read the names engraved there and wonder about those young men and their tragically shortened lives, thinking then of the mothers, wives and girlfriends they left behind. Theres such a poignancy about the First World War, a feeling that almost amounts to fascination amongst my generation, though fascinations perhaps the wrong word to use. I think its because we had grandfathers and great-uncles who fought and suffered in that war, some miraculously emerging alive to tell us their tales which we passed down through our families and which made us only all too aware of the human cost of war. Our familys story entwines with a young man Billy Melbourne who joined the Sherwood Foresters at the outbreak of the war. Before he went away, Billy became engaged to Mary Hollis, a young woman in service with whom he was in love. Perhaps Billy guessed his fate because he also elicited another promise from his best friend, Sam Horsley, to look after Mary should he fail to return. Sadly, Billy was killed on the Somme and, true to his promise, Sam not only looked after Mary but later married her too. Theres an irony in this. Poor eyesight left Sam unable to join up and when, shortly after the war, he lost his sight altogether, the reality was that Mary, a carer by both nature and upbringing, looked after him. Mary and Sam were my grandma and grandpa and I know they had a wonderfully happy marriage but Ive often pondered the fact that if Billy Melbourne had returned from the war, then Mary would have married him and not my grandpa. Our family would never have been. Billys ring, given with such love and hope for a future cruelly denied him, remains in our family to this day. Such is fate and its a common enough story Im sure, duplicated in families the length and breadth of the country. Left with no body to grieve over, the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey meant a lot to my grandma. To her reasoning, it could have been Billys body brought home with such pomp and ceremony or, there again, any one of those thousands of young men who lost their lives. A sorely needed focus point for what was a national outpouring of grief. The character of Ned Compton in Loxley is based on my grandpa and though the circumstances in which Ive put him are entirely fictitious, I hope that in his relationship with his granddaughter Ursula, Ive managed to capture some of the warmth and closeness that existed with his real life granddaughter who loved him very much. amazon.co.uk/Loxley-Sally-Wragg-ebook/dp/B00EHMH5XC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1382885019&sr=8-1&keywords=sally+wragg
Posted on: Sun, 27 Oct 2013 14:46:46 +0000
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