Who am I? A constructed perspective.

Me on ARP duty

If I am to attempt to experience the chronology of the war, I need a 'perspective' to experience it from. It needs to be as close to me as possible - so that I can engage in the passing of time with my own feelings and thoughts as part of that engagement, and yet routed in the time so that I am 'filtering' modern perceptions through the lens of a likely experience of the 1930's.

I am educated to PhD level in classical archeology, I write (scientific romances not unlike those of Mr H.G.Wells), and live in rural Norfolk with my two twin girls (11 years old) and my wife who is a teacher. My family are originally from Birmingham, my wife's are from Belgium. My politics is centralist and progressive, but by the standards of the 1930's must be considered leftwing. I am 48. Those are the facts about me that I consider intrinsic - they must be incorporated into my reconstructed 1930's persona if I am to carry enough of myself into this exercise to allow it to be 'me' that is experiencing the chronomonological passage of time, as opposed to a fictional character. Can we 'situate' such a person in 1939?

Our family is from Birmingham, and I was born in that city in 1891 and remember Victoria on the throne. I grew up in the late glow of Britain's imperial hey-day, but saw that shaken by the Boer War with it's controversies, a war that ended in 1902, when I was 11.

My father was a working man made good - working in railway engineering, becoming senior enough for my mother to stop work as a book-keeper, and concentrate on charity. I was perceptive enough to realise that the recipients were not always as grateful as you might expect.

Having been sent through a good school, somewhat to my father's disapproval (the subject I chose wasn't practical enough), Oxford and the study of classics called in 1909. By 1914 I had graduated, and was well advanced in my post graduate studies. I am under no illusions that I would have flocked to the flag as war was declared, like so many others, and in October I joined the 8th Battalion Ox and Bucks light infantry. The war took me to Macedonia, romantic as I followed in the footsteps of the ancients that I have studied. That romance, though, rapidly turned to blood, mud, dust and stench - war with the Bulgarians. War isn't noble and it's the everyman that suffers.

After the war I found that I couldn't return to the privilege of Oxford. I traveled a little (Athens, Rome, Constantinople), but getting back to England, I took a job teaching classics and little practical mathematics (ballistics and survey techniques picked up in the Army) in a minor school in Norfolk. I married - a Belgian who had fled the German invasion of 1914 and ending up in England as a refugee and staying when the war ended. Her father lives with us and helps with the children, but not my wife's nerves (which are bad). In fact, having been an admirer of Britain, he is now almost hostile to the country - it has disappointed him in someway that I find hard to understand. My wife thinks that it is because he idolised it from afar during 1914-18 having seen just the army. The reality of 'domestic Britain' simply didn't match up to his fantasy.

In 1928 my twin girls were born, and with a little money behind us we bought a house in a village outside Norwich, a second hand Austin 7, and a year or two later a cheap beach hut on the wash coast. Alongside this seemingly middle-class life I taught night classes in Norwich - something that helped me understand the realities of life for those that haven't studied classics excessively. The Spanish Civil War, the rise of facism, the slide back into a war I had thought fought and won, all tipped my politics to the left, but not to 'peace at all costs'.

All the while I have distracted myself, fighting back anxiety and depression triggered by my experiences in the Great War by writing speculative fiction in the mould of Stapleford and Wells. I admire Well's brand of leftwing futurism, and am fascinated by his predications for the 'Shape of Things to Come' - many of which seem all to likely to prove true. I am also a devote of George Orwell, a man who again and again sees to direct a situation - the Spanish Civil War in Homage to Catalonia, or the British social condition in any number of essays. I enjoy more casual literature too - a good murder mystery (Christie, Sayers, Allingham), cinema (particularly Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes), and musically I am more than partial to a bit of Victor Sylvester.

It is now 1939. If war comes I am intelligent enough to know that we have not prepared as perhaps we should, but there is the Empire, and there is the Navy. Looking through the lens of the ancient world is a weakness of mine - what my wife calls an occupational hazard - but the current situation reminds me uncomfortably of Athens squaring up to fight Sparta, and we all know how that ended. Or at least those of us who have lived too long in our books do.

I will weave in as much of my real life as I can - holidays, work trips, cinema trips, all used as contextualisation as much as possible. What films were showing in 1939? What would you have seen if you had travelled to Glasgow in 1943? How long would it have taken to get to Birmingham after a major bombing raid? All used to explore the realities of day to day life over the five and a half years of war.

This, then, is the man who is watching the next world war unfold. If, that is, war should come...