Author diaries

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14 June 2004 Entry: "Peace and War"

My trip to West Yorkshire Playhouse was like an odd mixture of package holiday, conference and freshers week at university - lack of responsibility, no home routine, sitting around with lots of strangers, drinking (on my part anyway) and the nagging feeling 'when is the real work going to begin ?'
There was a wonderful mix of folk - writers from Serbia, young writers from Leeds, and three of us 'older' writers from Newcastle and Warrington. All we had to do was turn up to prearranged workshops, talks, theatre visits and rehearsals of the extracts our own plays. I saw more theatre in that ten days than I see in months normally, and we had ready made discussion groups to dissect it all straightaway. I particularly enjoyed Huddersfield by Uglejesa Sajtinac, about post soviet Serbia, which had resonances on the industrial decline and lost hopes of the North East, and Ghost City by Gary Owen at the intimate space of Theatre in the Mill, Bradford, about 24 hours in the life of Cardiff City. Very bare staging, just lots of short interwoven monologues. It was great to have a piece of my own work getting up on its feet - like a baby lamb, you see its weaknesses but also its potential.
Also, meeting other writers and getting feedback, encouragement and support are great motivators. You end up facing the eternal truth - nothing's going to move your work forward unless you get off your backside and do it yourself.

After last week's 60th D Day commemorations, I was musing on how my childhood was completely informed by war even though I was born seven years after it had ended. Our dressy up box was full of bits of khaki uniforms, 'bombsite' was synonymous with 'playground', we played games at night with torches, a very scary type of hide and seek we called 'Gestapo', and I only realised when I was older that the poker for our stove in the kitchen was actually a world war one bayonet. I thought everyone had 'swords' to poke the fire with - it was only later that I shuddered thinking of what it represented.
Then last week my brother was reading a sunday supplement magazine, only to see a picture of my father, commander of a tank crew in Bayeux, taken three weeks after D Day; presumably an official photograph and not one we had ever seen. My father had been on what he called a 'mopping up' exercise, although that domestic word belied the experiences he encountered and rarely talked about. When we were little and asked the inevitable question 'Did you kill anyone?' he would usually reply 'I hope not', which never convinced me or satisfied my innocent gruesome curiosity.
It was only a few years before his death that he finally began to write about it: - the terror of men facing battle and as their commander, even though he was just as scared, how he swore at them to keep going, desperate to avoid disarray that would endanger more lives, how he saw men killed by 'friendly fire', a more common experience than is often acknowledged, and the death of a close companion. The love he felt for this man was more than just friendship; he hinted at a much deeper, physical emotion, but whether he meant it was brought about by the circumstances or whether this was a side of himself he suppressed in peacetime, I've never been sure about. I have my parents war time letters but I haven't been able to bring myself to read them yet.
I realise my generation are now the age where we will be asked by schoolchildren 'Do you remember the war? what was it like?'