What We Are Writing: Rhys Bowen on Suitable for Memorial Day

RHYS BOWEN: For once I don't have to think about a suitable post for what I am writing. I saw so many powerful images of Memorial Day, I saw a tank museum on TV and learned that the life expectancy of a tank member during WWII was twenty nine minutes after they went into battle. Imagine knowing that and yet doing your duty anyway. I also so a photo last week of a landing craft, heading for Dunkirk. The men looking up for the camera, some giving cheeky grins, others innocent stares. About ninety percent of them would be dead within an hour. So senseless. So many young lives lost needlessly. And yet most believed WWII was necessary. They volunteered to do their part to stop evil from swallowing the world.

I write about a similar scenario in my next stand-alone novel set in the East of England during the war. My heroine is evacuated from a bombed house in London to the countryside, and finds herself next to a bomber command base. Every night those planes set off for Germany and every morning some don't return. Fifty percent of bomber crew did not survive. Fifty percent. Think about it. You eat in the mess hall and look at the man next to you and think "will it be you or me not sitting here tomorrow?" but they still did it. They still climbed into planes and flew off into the darkness ahead.

Here is a small scene near when Josie arrives in Lincolnshire:

The hot water bottle made her bed bearably warm but Josie awoke the next morning to find her window completely covered in patterns of frost. When she cleared some of it away she looked out on a sparkling world. A red sun hung over the Eastern horizon. Snow covered fields seemed to go on forever, divided by dykes and canals that glowed pink in the rising sun. After the narrowness and confinement of a big city all her life this landscape took Josie’s breath away. She had never imagined such an enormous sky.

 As she watched she heard the muffled roar of a plane and saw two aircraft coming in to land. Two bombers, heavy, unwieldy. She noticed that one of them was pitching and shuddering like a wounded insect, and then she saw the reason—part of one wing had been destroyed. She watched the unscathed plane lower its wheels and dip behind the line of the trees, then the damaged plane dipped too. Suddenly there was an explosion, a fireball rose over the trees and she realized that the plane had crashed trying to land. She turned away, feeling sick.  The enchanted sparkling landscape now had a new dimension—it was a place of danger.

I think we now appreciate books about WWII because we have all lived in a place of danger for the past year. We have now been in a position when we never feel completely safe. We might have taken every precaution but opening the door to a stranger, bumping into someone in a supermarket might mean our death. And now we can actually feel what it was like to live in a time when bombing was a regular occurrence , when invasion a possibility, when most of Europe was invaded by the enemy.

And yet people got on with their lives. They did what they were supposed to, they snatched happiness wherever they could and didn't think beyond tomorrow.

We honor them all now. Not just those who went out to fight but those who stayed at home and kept going amidst bombed out homes and lost love ones.