:00:00. > :00:07.continues to burn. It's time for this week's Meet The
:00:08. > :00:10.Author with Nick Higham. This year marks the centenary of the
:00:11. > :00:15.start of the First World War, and scores of books are being published
:00:16. > :00:20.to mark the anniversary. On a crop of expanding novels are two, the
:00:21. > :00:27.midfield I Judith Alnatt tells the story -- The Moon Field. It tells
:00:28. > :00:32.what happened to them and what happens to the families left
:00:33. > :00:36.behind. Wake: A Novel looks at the aftermath of the war. It is set
:00:37. > :00:40.around Armistice Day in 1920 when the body of the unknown Warrior was
:00:41. > :00:44.brought back from France for burial in Westminster Abbey. Two novels
:00:45. > :00:56.about the impact of the war both on the men who were caught up in it,
:00:57. > :01:01.and on the women left at home. Anna Hope, Judith Alnatt, I didn't
:01:02. > :01:04.want to accuse either of you of opportunism, but this is the
:01:05. > :01:07.centenary of the start of the First World War and you have both written
:01:08. > :01:12.books about the First World War. How far were you deliberately setting
:01:13. > :01:18.out to mark the event? How big a factor was that?
:01:19. > :01:23.Not at all is the short answer. I was researching a lot of early 20th
:01:24. > :01:26.century women's social history for another project I was working on,
:01:27. > :01:31.and I started to think about 1918, women getting the vote, but a change
:01:32. > :01:36.for women in that period, and I started researching for a novel
:01:37. > :01:41.about women's experience of World War I. And about six months into
:01:42. > :01:45.resetting it I suddenly realised that it would be the centenary in
:01:46. > :01:50.2014, which filled me with fear. I thought, that will be a big deal! It
:01:51. > :01:54.could be a good thing, but let's wait and see.
:01:55. > :02:00.There are lots lot of books about the war being published this year.
:02:01. > :02:03.Judith, was that a factor for you? Not entirely. I first got interested
:02:04. > :02:08.in the First World War from family stories when I was a child... I had
:02:09. > :02:15.the great-grandfather who was pinned against a post by barbed wire that
:02:16. > :02:26.he was cutting, and he was actually whacked on the head by an enemy's
:02:27. > :02:30.rifle but, he didn't die, and he had an operation and a silver plate in
:02:31. > :02:35.his head. Crikey!
:02:36. > :02:39.So there were a number of these stories baby feel an emotional
:02:40. > :02:47.connection with the subject. Anne, your three central characters
:02:48. > :02:49.are all woman, who are all to a greater or lesser extent, affected
:02:50. > :02:58.by the war and what it has done to their men. The older women are, you
:02:59. > :03:03.feel, going to find it difficult to recover. The younger woman who is
:03:04. > :03:08.just 18 seems to represent a young future. Is that what you had
:03:09. > :03:11.intended? Definitely. One of the things that
:03:12. > :03:15.struck me I was researching was that I went over to France and less of
:03:16. > :03:21.the cemeteries, and I saw the memorials to the following and the
:03:22. > :03:25.memorials to 78,000 missing men, and I was really struck by the fact that
:03:26. > :03:29.they're all of these men, none of whom were brought back from the
:03:30. > :03:33.Western front. So all of these families who would have lost a
:03:34. > :03:38.family member were denied the ordinary comforting rituals of
:03:39. > :03:42.death. And particularly I think in working-class culture, people would
:03:43. > :03:47.have had a very tangible relationship with death. The body
:03:48. > :03:50.would have been laid out. The same person would have been the midwife
:03:51. > :03:55.as would have come to lay out the body, and this extraordinary rupture
:03:56. > :03:58.that happen. Not only have they lost a family member, but they weren't
:03:59. > :04:04.coming home, and maybe they didn't even have a grave. The people that
:04:05. > :04:08.have graves, that have maps with photographs of the graves, they were
:04:09. > :04:12.the lucky ones. And saw that lack of closure, which is a very modern
:04:13. > :04:18.world, but that lack of closure started to obsess me. This event,
:04:19. > :04:22.the burial of the Unknown Soldier comes to have an incredible symbolic
:04:23. > :04:27.significance. To modernise, this extraordinary
:04:28. > :04:33.ceremony for the selected our body dug up from one of the battlefields,
:04:34. > :04:35.unknown, unnamed, anonymous. A body bag with enormous ceremony through
:04:36. > :04:44.the roads of northern France, across the Channel on the warship, only
:04:45. > :04:47.coming carriage, into London to the new cenotaph which was unveiled by
:04:48. > :04:54.the king that very day. That ceremony, two hours, today it seems
:04:55. > :04:58.slightly inextricable, but to contemporaries, presumed that had
:04:59. > :05:01.commended significance. Extraordinary significance and
:05:02. > :05:05.resonance. The more I researched it, the more poignant it became.
:05:06. > :05:08.Thousands of people were on the cliffs of Dover waiting for this
:05:09. > :05:11.ship to come in, and then thousands and thousands of people lined the
:05:12. > :05:18.train tracks waiting for a glimpse of this carriage. Almost feral
:05:19. > :05:21.displays of grief by people who have to carry this within the Manhattan
:05:22. > :05:29.had this ritual death, this funeral. It seemed extremely to me
:05:30. > :05:35.that I didn't know about this. It felt he defining moment.
:05:36. > :05:42.Judith, you also have two female characters who have to come to terms
:05:43. > :05:44.with changes and losses of war. One of the significant differences
:05:45. > :05:49.between the two books is that in Anne's book, we hear second-hand
:05:50. > :05:53.from some of those who were there but it was like in the trenches. You
:05:54. > :05:57.have decided on your book to go for that head-on. You tell us very
:05:58. > :06:02.directly what it was like to be in the trenches. Was at a difficult
:06:03. > :06:10.decision to take? Well, I wanted to take a very young
:06:11. > :06:13.hero. My hero, George, is only 18. I wanted to show what it was like
:06:14. > :06:19.somebody so young, so innocent, I suppose, to be dropped into such a
:06:20. > :06:24.hellish situation, because it struck me that this was not the usual rite
:06:25. > :06:28.of passage. And that it would be enormously terrifying, and that
:06:29. > :06:31.there were so many of these young soldiers who weren't mature
:06:32. > :06:38.physically, mentally or emotionally to deal with it. And selected the
:06:39. > :06:42.site to do it head-on, and I read an awful lot of letters and journals in
:06:43. > :06:47.an attempt to find out what it was actually like. What were the sense
:06:48. > :06:52.impressions of somebody there. What was it like to see the flavours and
:06:53. > :06:54.hear the shells. Both these books are about the
:06:55. > :07:00.legacy of war and about remembrance. Yours and is an
:07:01. > :07:02.excellent dimension because one of your characters is very badly
:07:03. > :07:08.disfigured in his face by an injury. There are some extraordinary
:07:09. > :07:12.pastels done by an artist who also horrified as a surgeon, pastels of
:07:13. > :07:20.men who suffered facial winds. Heeded those later for a colleague,
:07:21. > :07:24.a pioneering mastic surgeon. Early in the war, in 1914, that was an
:07:25. > :07:28.option. Your character ends up any mask.
:07:29. > :07:34.Yes, it's interesting that Henry Tonks said about his pastels that he
:07:35. > :07:39.considered them dreadful subjects, to dreadful for the public view. I
:07:40. > :07:43.was interested in this way that disfigured soldiers were treated
:07:44. > :07:45.differently. Facially disfigured soldiers were treated differently
:07:46. > :07:51.from those who had injuries elsewhere. They were very much
:07:52. > :07:54.hidden away. Amputees would feature in propaganda or press, but not
:07:55. > :07:58.people who were facially disfigured. The public reaction in
:07:59. > :08:04.some cases is quite horrible. People who were facially injured were
:08:05. > :08:11.called Brewers. Sometimes kids would follow them and throw stones. A lot
:08:12. > :08:14.of them went into work that meant they could hide away, like my
:08:15. > :08:20.character becomes a projectionist in a cinema so that he does not have to
:08:21. > :08:23.face the public. And of course, if it is a young man, those awful
:08:24. > :08:31.anxieties about Willie ever meet a woman who will...
:08:32. > :08:36.See through the mask. Yes, see the real them.
:08:37. > :08:42.How difficult was it for both of you to find an upbeat ending for a novel
:08:43. > :08:45.which is about something so grim? You know, it wasn't that difficult,
:08:46. > :08:53.because there was so much that was happening at the time in 1920. Those
:08:54. > :08:59.five days in the book came to me to be this fault line of what has gone
:09:00. > :09:02.before and what came after. This empire before the war that was
:09:03. > :09:05.totally sure of its status in the world, and then you've got this
:09:06. > :09:14.incredible fracturing of the second phase. Fracturing of those
:09:15. > :09:21.certainties. Britain was never sure of its status again. A big section
:09:22. > :09:29.of my novel is set in the Alexandra Palace. 6000 people came there on
:09:30. > :09:34.its opening night. And it was a band, the original Dixieland jazz
:09:35. > :09:38.band, who did London by storm and played a residency. And a must have
:09:39. > :09:43.been such a need for these people to dance, and they did dance. The idea
:09:44. > :09:49.of the redemptive moment happening at the same time as this national
:09:50. > :09:56.moment of the burial of the unknown Warrior, felt like it had that
:09:57. > :10:09.moment, that movement, for me. Thank you both very much indeed.
:10:10. > :10:13.Good evening, still no sign of any prolonged settled weather across the
:10:14. > :10:14.United Kingdom. Overnight we will continue to see showers,