Day eighteen of the ‘advent calendar’ focusing on some of the historical/genealogical sources that I used in the writing of Barefoot on the Cobbles.

The chapter that I was most concerned about was the one set on the Western Front. It was the only location that I was unable to visit and I have no experience of being a young man, or of being in a combat zone. I read fifty or so pages of the regiment’s official War Diaries that outlined the campaign in which Abraham was involved. These were useful but I was not writing a military history; I needed emotions and feelings, not just facts. I turned to private diaries, letters and memoirs of the war in general and the battle in particular. I really wish I could have written this passage, describing the Battle of Fromelles, which comes from the memoirs of Private Jimmy Dowling. ‘Stammering scores of German machine-guns spluttered violently, drowning the noise of the cannonade. The air was thick with bullets, swishing in a flat, criss-crossed lattice of death … Hundreds were mown down in the flicker of an eyelid, like great rows of teeth knocked from a comb … Men were cut in two by streams of bullets [that] swept like whirling knives … It was the Charge of the Light Brigade once more, but more terrible, more hopeless – magnificent, but not war – a valley of death filled by somebody’s blunder.’ I tried to imbue my narrative with similar feeling. When a lovely reviewer described my chapter as ‘one of the most poignant and empathic commentaries of WW1 that I have ever read’, not only was I incredulous, overwhelmed and tearful but I knew that all the research had been worthwhile.

More information about Barefoot on the Cobbles can be found here. Copies are available at various events and at all my presentations. You can order from Blue Poppy Publishing or directly from me. Kindle editions are available for those in the UK, USA, Australasia and Canada.