16/01/2014 Meet the Author

continues to burn. It's time for this week's Meet The

Author with Nick Higham. This year marks the centenary of the

start of the First World War, and scores of books are being published

to mark the anniversary. On a crop of expanding novels are two, the

midfield I Judith Alnatt tells the story -- The Moon Field. It tells

what happened to them and what happens to the families left

behind. Wake: A Novel looks at the aftermath of the war. It is set

around Armistice Day in 1920 when the body of the unknown Warrior was

brought back from France for burial in Westminster Abbey. Two novels

about the impact of the war both on the men who were caught up in it,

and on the women left at home. Anna Hope, Judith Alnatt, I didn't

want to accuse either of you of opportunism, but this is the

centenary of the start of the First World War and you have both written

books about the First World War. How far were you deliberately setting

out to mark the event? How big a factor was that?

Not at all is the short answer. I was researching a lot of early 20th

century women's social history for another project I was working on,

and I started to think about 1918, women getting the vote, but a change

for women in that period, and I started researching for a novel

about women's experience of World War I. And about six months into

resetting it I suddenly realised that it would be the centenary in

2014, which filled me with fear. I thought, that will be a big deal! It

could be a good thing, but let's wait and see.

There are lots lot of books about the war being published this year.

Judith, was that a factor for you? Not entirely. I first got interested

in the First World War from family stories when I was a child... I had

the great-grandfather who was pinned against a post by barbed wire that

he was cutting, and he was actually whacked on the head by an enemy's

rifle but, he didn't die, and he had an operation and a silver plate in

his head. Crikey!

So there were a number of these stories baby feel an emotional

connection with the subject. Anne, your three central characters

are all woman, who are all to a greater or lesser extent, affected

by the war and what it has done to their men. The older women are, you

feel, going to find it difficult to recover. The younger woman who is

just 18 seems to represent a young future. Is that what you had

intended? Definitely. One of the things that

struck me I was researching was that I went over to France and less of

the cemeteries, and I saw the memorials to the following and the

memorials to 78,000 missing men, and I was really struck by the fact that

they're all of these men, none of whom were brought back from the

Western front. So all of these families who would have lost a

family member were denied the ordinary comforting rituals of

death. And particularly I think in working-class culture, people would

have had a very tangible relationship with death. The body

would have been laid out. The same person would have been the midwife

as would have come to lay out the body, and this extraordinary rupture

that happen. Not only have they lost a family member, but they weren't

coming home, and maybe they didn't even have a grave. The people that

have graves, that have maps with photographs of the graves, they were

the lucky ones. And saw that lack of closure, which is a very modern

world, but that lack of closure started to obsess me. This event,

the burial of the Unknown Soldier comes to have an incredible symbolic

significance. To modernise, this extraordinary

ceremony for the selected our body dug up from one of the battlefields,

unknown, unnamed, anonymous. A body bag with enormous ceremony through

the roads of northern France, across the Channel on the warship, only

coming carriage, into London to the new cenotaph which was unveiled by

the king that very day. That ceremony, two hours, today it seems

slightly inextricable, but to contemporaries, presumed that had

commended significance. Extraordinary significance and

resonance. The more I researched it, the more poignant it became.

Thousands of people were on the cliffs of Dover waiting for this

ship to come in, and then thousands and thousands of people lined the

train tracks waiting for a glimpse of this carriage. Almost feral

displays of grief by people who have to carry this within the Manhattan

had this ritual death, this funeral. It seemed extremely to me

that I didn't know about this. It felt he defining moment.

Judith, you also have two female characters who have to come to terms

with changes and losses of war. One of the significant differences

between the two books is that in Anne's book, we hear second-hand

from some of those who were there but it was like in the trenches. You

have decided on your book to go for that head-on. You tell us very

directly what it was like to be in the trenches. Was at a difficult

decision to take? Well, I wanted to take a very young

hero. My hero, George, is only 18. I wanted to show what it was like

somebody so young, so innocent, I suppose, to be dropped into such a

hellish situation, because it struck me that this was not the usual rite

of passage. And that it would be enormously terrifying, and that

there were so many of these young soldiers who weren't mature

physically, mentally or emotionally to deal with it. And selected the

site to do it head-on, and I read an awful lot of letters and journals in

an attempt to find out what it was actually like. What were the sense

impressions of somebody there. What was it like to see the flavours and

hear the shells. Both these books are about the

legacy of war and about remembrance. Yours and is an

excellent dimension because one of your characters is very badly

disfigured in his face by an injury. There are some extraordinary

pastels done by an artist who also horrified as a surgeon, pastels of

men who suffered facial winds. Heeded those later for a colleague,

a pioneering mastic surgeon. Early in the war, in 1914, that was an

option. Your character ends up any mask.

Yes, it's interesting that Henry Tonks said about his pastels that he

considered them dreadful subjects, to dreadful for the public view. I

was interested in this way that disfigured soldiers were treated

differently. Facially disfigured soldiers were treated differently

from those who had injuries elsewhere. They were very much

hidden away. Amputees would feature in propaganda or press, but not

people who were facially disfigured. The public reaction in

some cases is quite horrible. People who were facially injured were

called Brewers. Sometimes kids would follow them and throw stones. A lot

of them went into work that meant they could hide away, like my

character becomes a projectionist in a cinema so that he does not have to

face the public. And of course, if it is a young man, those awful

anxieties about Willie ever meet a woman who will...

See through the mask. Yes, see the real them.

How difficult was it for both of you to find an upbeat ending for a novel

which is about something so grim? You know, it wasn't that difficult,

because there was so much that was happening at the time in 1920. Those

five days in the book came to me to be this fault line of what has gone

before and what came after. This empire before the war that was

totally sure of its status in the world, and then you've got this

incredible fracturing of the second phase. Fracturing of those

certainties. Britain was never sure of its status again. A big section

of my novel is set in the Alexandra Palace. 6000 people came there on

its opening night. And it was a band, the original Dixieland jazz

band, who did London by storm and played a residency. And a must have

been such a need for these people to dance, and they did dance. The idea

of the redemptive moment happening at the same time as this national

moment of the burial of the unknown Warrior, felt like it had that

moment, that movement, for me. Thank you both very much indeed.

Good evening, still no sign of any prolonged settled weather across the

United Kingdom. Overnight we will continue to see showers,