Such Stuff: A Story-Maker's Inspiration

  Nobody knows exactly how many people died in Dresden during the bombing campaign, as it was crammed with up to half a million refugees. The figure lies between 25,000 and 100,000.

  At the beginning of the Second World War, the bombing of military targets was expected, but the first bombing of London caused outrage, because it was accidental. Bombing London had been specifically prohibited by Hitler, not through humanitarian concern, but because Hitler believed that Britain might still agree peace terms. On 24 August 1940, Luftwaffe bombers, aiming for military targets near London, drifted off course. They dropped bombs on the centre of London. Several homes were destroyed and nine civilians killed. In retaliation, prime minister Winston Churchill ordered Berlin to be bombed the next evening, stunning the Germans by the attack on their capital. Berliners had been repeatedly assured by Luftwaffe chief, Hermann Göring, that this would never happen.

  The notorious and shameful bombing of Dresden took place near the end of the war. By then, Germany was in full retreat. In an internal RAF memo from 1945, the strategy behind the bombing of Dresden was discussed: “Dresden is the largest unbombed city the enemy has got. In the midst of winter with refugees pouring westwards and troops to be rested, roofs are at a premium. The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front, to prevent the use of the city in the way of further advance, and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.”

  The destruction of Dresden continues to appall the British national conscience. Some historians suggest that the Allies “descended to the enemy’s level”, and that it was militarily unnecessary as Germany was a “spent force” by this time. Indeed, after the raids, Churchill tried to distance himself, describing the policy of bombing cities as “mere acts of terror and wanton destruction”. Others argue that Dresden was not simply a cultural centre, but was home to factories producing weapons and equipment. It had a rail base to send troops east to the war front with the Soviets.

  Others felt that any action that helped to shorten the war was justified. Bomber Harris held such a view: “I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.” He stated openly: “The destruction of industrial sites always was some sort of bonus for us. Our real targets always were the inner cities.” Such rationalization of killing and destruction is unfortunately something still familiar today in other wars around the world.

  Shadow

  THE DREAM

  I have often, maybe too often, written stories about wars and conflicts of the past. This is, I think, largely because of my own past, growing up as I did in the aftermath of the Second World War. The effects of war, the bombsites, the rationing, the sadness and the grieving, the pride and passion, the stories were all around me at home, in the war games we played in the streets and at school, in the comic books we read. Those things stayed with me, and as memory of childhood informs why and what I care and write about so much, I suppose it was inevitable that war would play a significant part in my story-making. But I have no actual memories of war, just the aftermath of it, the damage left.

  Borrowed memories too often played their part in these stories. Friend or Foe, for instance, is loosely based on the experiences of my Aunt Bess, who, at the beginning of the Second World War was a teacher in a London junior school, and had to evacuate all the children in her school down to Cornwall, to escape the bombing. Other stories of that war have followed, over the years – among them, The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips, Billy the Kid, The Mozart Question, An Elephant in the Garden, and many others. And the First World War – because I had grown up with the poems and the plays and the songs of the times, I suppose – also began to find its way into my books – again, largely inspired by the borrowed memories of those who had been there and lived through it.

  But then, one day, in a school I was visiting, where they had studied my books in detail, I was asked why did I not write about the wars that were going on now? I am not sure how I replied. I hope it wasn’t too trite, or too evasive. I suspect it might have been both, because, if truth be told, I was rather flummoxed, probably because this was a young reader challenging me to write out of what must have seemed to him to be my comfort zone. There was clearly implied criticism here, and I knew it was justified.

  I reflected on this afterwards and it made me distinctly uncomfortable to do so. I had to acknowledge to myself that I had indeed always been writing about past conflicts, and had therefore, to a degree at least, employed the perspective of time and of history as a kind of comfort zone. Maybe this had inadvertently distanced me and the reader from the actuality and brutality and suffering of the wars of today. Like it or not, benefit of hindsight can so easily encourage an overly convenient and simplistic way of thinking about any war.

  I realized that, if I was not careful, I could easily be falling into the trap of simply using war to make stories, stories of old wars, over-and-done-with wars, wars that we don’t need to worry about too much. By not writing about wars of today, was I not implying to readers young and old that wars only happened in the past, that they were the important wars, that the world was not like that now? With so much conflict in the world, where was the integrity in that?

  And this was not the first time I had been asked such a testing question. In Amman in Jordan some time before, I had been asked by a teenage Palestinian girl why I had never written about the conflict in Palestine and Israel, that surely this was at the heart of so many troubles in the world, the cause of so much suffering. I remember I said at the time that it was because I did not know enough about it. She said, and quite politely, that maybe I could find out. It soon became a question I could not ignore. It took me years to find a way to write a story about this conflict, years of dreamtime before I was able to write The Kites Are Flying!, a story of hope in the midst of despair. It was, and is, difficult sometimes to believe in hope, but the only hope for peace, in that seemingly unending conflict, was, I thought, in the children on either side. So I wrote about them, and about flying kites over the wall that divides the two communities.

  Both the boy in the school in England and the girl in Amman had been right, in a way. It was too easy to dwell on the past, to take the comfortable route of writing about wars that were over and done. I would have to do what he challenged me to do, as I had with the girl in Amman. I would write about Afghanistan, where soldiers on all sides would be fighting and dying as I wrote. I would no longer have the hiding place of history, if that’s what it had been.

  I was a soldier, briefly, a long while ago, but never went to war. I had trained for it, though, so when reading newspaper reports of Afghanistan, or Iraq, I understood at least something of what these young men were going through. Like everyone else, I saw the coffins coming home, the grieving families, and was asking the questions of myself that so many were asking: “What was this war for?” “Why did we send our young men to fight and die in this place so far away?” “Is it even winnable?” “Haven’t we sent armies there twice before to fight in hopeless campaigns?” The more questions I asked myself, the more urgent it seemed to be to write a story about this war, if nothing else so that I could begin to understand it better myself.

  Somehow, sooner or later, I seem to tumble upon the heart of a story – by accident or design, I am never quite sure which. Probably both, the one provoking the other. With Shadow, I happened upon four different stories, true stories, that enabled me to begin the process of weaving my tale together. For me, the oxygen of truth is so often a great enabler.

  Some images you never forget, even if you want to. The blowing-up by the Taliban of the great Buddha statues of Bamiyan in 2001, a World Heritage Site, shocked the world. It was not wanton destruction so much as a calculated attempt to desecrate a holy place, and expunge a culture, to annihilate a religion, to deracinate a people. So when, some years later, I was invited to watch a documentary film c
alled The Boy from Bamiyan by Phil Grabsky, I remembered the name, recalled what had happened there. And here was an extraordinarily powerful film about a boy called Mir, who grows up in the caves of Bamiyan, lives among the rubble of the ruins of the place. It brought me close for the first time to the lives of the children of Afghanistan who have lived through all these years of war, years of terror or turbulence. So many of them have never known a world without war. Mir and his family stay and survive and rebuild despite all the hardships. Many, of course, do not. Many thousands of Afghan families have fled, have come to Britain seeking safety and refuge, seeking asylum.

  Then, quite out of the blue, a newspaper story helped me along the way as I was dreaming up the story that was to become Shadow. There are very few stories about any war that make you smile, that lift your spirits. But I found one, or, rather, it found me. Actually some kind friend sent it to me because they thought I might like it. I did.

  Here’s the story. In 2008, in Afghanistan, a company of Australian and Afghan soldiers were on patrol with their sniffer dog, Sabi, a black Labrador. (These dogs were routinely used to sniff out roadside explosives.) They were ambushed by the Taliban and got into a fire-fight. When it was over, the soldiers looked around for Sabi. He had disappeared. They knew the Taliban especially targeted dogs like Sabi, who had saved countless lives by sniffing out roadside bombs hidden by the Taliban. So the soldiers feared the worst. They looked for Sabi every time they went out on patrol after that, but there was no sign of him, no sighting. Then, fourteen months later, an American soldier spotted a black Labrador wandering in the desert, not in the best condition, but alive and friendly. The story of Sabi’s disappearance was well known, so it wasn’t long before he was reunited with the Australian and Afghan soldiers he had known.

  But, I thought, how on earth had Subi survived that long? Certainly not on his own. Someone must have fed him, looked after him. Dogs are not favoured pets among the Hazara people of that region, but might a young boy living in those caves of Bamiyan find in him a good companion? Maybe. And maybe his family, terrorized by the Taliban, decide to flee to Britain, to join an uncle already there. My story seemed to be telling itself by now. But one last piece of the jigsaw was needed before I could make my story whole. I didn’t know what it would look like. I just knew it was necessary.

  Then I heard something from a friend I could hardly believe to be true. Did I know, she said, that there is a detention centre in England (a prison, effectively) where asylum seekers who are due to be expelled, sent home – whichever you call it – are confined for weeks, sometimes months. And did I know that among them are many, many children? So therefore, in this country, our country, we are imprisoning children who have committed no crime, other than seeking asylum – which is not a crime. I could not believe it. But it was true. It is called Yarl’s Wood, in Bedfordshire. Appalled, outraged, I knew now where my story would end up. I wasn’t sure exactly how it would finish. I’m never sure how a story will end when I begin it. But I knew Yarl’s Wood would play a shameful part in the denouement. Now I didn’t just have the desire to tell my story, I had the compulsion I always need. I had the wool, the warp and the weft, and the design in my head. I had the loom too, my pen and my scribbling book. I was the weaver. I had all I needed. I could get on.

  A year or so later, the book published, I found myself with the BBC television crew outside the gates of Yarl’s Wood, making a documentary about the place and about all those asylum-seeking families and children locked up inside. We were not allowed in. We stood there, outside the high-wire fence, and I quoted from William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”: “A robin redbreast in a cage, Puts all heaven in a rage”. I was in a rage too, as were so many others who had campaigned tirelessly for this abominable practice of imprisoning children to be stopped. And still the battle is not over.

  One way I can help fight a battle that needs to be fought is to write about it, tell a story about it, raise awareness, to help bring about change. Rather greater writers have done this before me, from Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol, in which he exposes the cruelty and poverty he had witnessed all around him in the streets of London; to Ted Hughes’ Iron Woman, which is so strong in its condemnation of how we despoil and poison our environment. It is a fine tradition. These masters led where I have tried to follow, in Shadow and in The Kites Are Flying!, and in many other stories too.

  SHADOW

  The door of the container opened. The daylight blinded us. We could not see who it was at first.

  It was not the police.

  It turned out to be the fixer man, and his gang, the same people who had put us in there. They said we could get out if we wanted and stretch our legs, that we were waiting for some other people to join us.

  We were in a kind of loading bay with lorries all around, but not many people. We should have run off there and then, but one of the fixer’s gang always seemed to be watching us, so we didn’t dare.

  Only a few minutes later, it was too late.

  The other refugees arrived, and we were all herded back into the same container, given some more blankets, a little fruit, and a bottle or two of water. They slammed the doors shut on us again and the fixer shouted at us, that no matter what, we mustn’t call out, or we’d all be caught and taken to prison. We could hear the lorry being loaded up around us.

  It was a while, I remember, before my eyes became accustomed to the dark again, and I could see the others.

  As the lorry drove off we sat there in silence for a while, just looking at one another. I counted twelve of us in all, mostly from Iran, and a family – mother, father and a little boy – from Pakistan, and beside us an old couple from Afghanistan, from Kabul.

  It was Ahmed, the little boy from Pakistan, who got us talking. He came over to me to show me his toy train, because I was the only other kid there, because he knew he could trust me, I think – it was plastic and bright red, I remember, and he was very proud of it.

  He knelt down to show me how it worked on the floor, telling everyone about how his grandpa worked on the trains in Pakistan. And, in secret, I showed him the silver-star badge Sergeant Brodie had given me. Ahmed loved looking at it. He was full of questions about it, about everything. He liked me, he said, because I had a name that sounded like his. It wasn’t long before we were telling one another our stories. To begin with, Ahmed and me, we laughed a lot, and played about, and that cheered everyone up. But it didn’t last. I think our laughter lasted about as long as the fruit and water.

  I don’t know where that lorry took us, nor how many days and nights we were locked up in the container. They didn’t let us out, not once, not to go to the toilet even, nothing. And we didn’t dare shout out. They brought us no more water, no more food. We were freezing by night, and stifling hot by day.

  When I was awake, I just longed to be asleep, so I could forget what was happening, forget how much I was longing every moment for water and for food. Waking up was the worst. When we talked amongst each other now, it was usually to guess where we were, whether we were still in Iran, or in Turkey, or maybe in Italy. But none of this made any sense to me, because I had no idea where any of these places were.

  Most of them, like Ahmed and his parents, said they were trying to get to England, like we were, but a few were going to Germany or Sweden. One or two had tried before, like the old couple from Kabul who were going to live with their son in England, they told us, but they had already been caught twice and sent back. They were never going to give up trying, they said.

  But in the end the stories stopped altogether, and there was no more talking, just the sound of moaning and crying, and praying. We all prayed. For me the journey in that lorry was like travelling through a long dark tunnel, with no light at the end of it. And there was no air to breathe either, that was the worst of it. People were coughing and choking, and Ahmed was being sick too. But he still held on to his little red train.

  The smell, I’ll never forget the
smell.

  After that I think I must have lost consciousness, because I don’t remember much more. When I woke up – it was probably days later, I don’t know – the lorry had stopped. Maybe it was the shouting and the crying that woke me up, because that was all I could hear. Mother and the others were on their feet and banging on the side of the container, screaming to be let out.

  By the time they came for us and dragged me out of there, I was only half alive.

  But I was luckier than Little Ahmed.

  When his father carried him out into the daylight, we could see for sure that he was dead. Ahmed’s mother was wailing in her grief. It was like a cry of pain from deep inside her, a crying that I knew would never end for her. I never heard such a dreadful sound before, and I hope I never will again.

  Later that same day, after they had buried him, his mother gave me his toy train to look after, because I had been like a brother to Ahmed, she said.

  I’ve still got Ahmed’s little red train, back home in Manchester. The police, when they came to take us away, wouldn’t let me bring it with me. I forgot it and wanted to go back for it, and they wouldn’t let me. There wasn’t time, they said. It’s on the windowsill in my bedroom.

  I dream about Ahmed quite a bit, and often it’s almost the same dream. He’s with Shadow, and with Sergeant Brodie, and they’re playing together outside the walls of a castle. It’s night and the sky is a ceiling of painted stars, and he’s throwing a ball for her.

  Strange that, how in dreams people who never even knew one another, can meet up in places they could never have been to.