Annual Booklist 2019 : Vee Walker
Vee Walker has an MA in Modern Languages from Edinburgh and an M Sc Sc in Heritage Management from the Ironbridge Institute. She is a well-known museum and heritage consultant working in the UK and Europe and a member of the Museums Association. She has just written Find Aleckie, an interactive story set in the aftermath at the Battle of Culloden, for family visitors to the Battlefield (National Trust for Scotland). She is the author of The 1810 Cookbook (FTRR Press 2011) and Major Tom’s War (Kashi House 2018), which was awarded second place in the inaugural SAHR Prize for Military Fiction 2018/19.
Vee lives on the Black Isle, just north of Inverness, and describes herself as a storyteller first and an historian second.
Major Tom’s War evolved out of the transcription of my grandfather Tom Westmacott’s unpublished war diary – more of a scrapbook really, bulging with photographs, documents and letters – which covers the entire war from 1914 – 1918. Although Tom joined the Central India Horse as a Captain in 1914 his subsequent transfer to the military police as an APM meant he did not then accompany his regiment when it left, in March 1918, for Syria. My book moved from being a non-fiction memoire into a novel about three years before publication and as you can imagine this was a period of intense historical research on the First World War for me. Allow me to share with you five of the books I found most inspiring, useful or illuminating during this time:
Firstly, there is the unequalled Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1933). Before everyone howls that this is not a book about the army, I would beg to differ. The impact of bereavement through military action on people at home must be understood as part of the story of army life. It is grippingly well-written. As Brittain (mother of Baroness Williams of Crosby, Shirley Williams) loses first one loved-one and then another, the sheer numbing volume of loss hits the reader almost as hard as it did at the time. Interestingly, Brittain writes that she began Testament of Youth as a novel but found herself unable to complete it as everything was too raw: it became a memoire instead, the exact opposite of my own literary journey.
Regimental histories can be the most indigestible of fare, but I can recommend this one: King George's Own Central India Horse: the story of a local corps by Major-General W.A. Watson (1930) covers its full history, not just the period of the First World War. It is full of entertaining detail, tigers, pig-sticking and rebellious natives as well as a vivid account of the corps’ time in France and then Syria. Watson gets a detail or two wrong (Tom’s rank on arrival is incorrect, for example, providing me with a very useful plot twist), but this is an immensely readable book. The graphic, shocked description of the death of one character who features in Major Tom’s War reduced me to tears. Particularly pleasing, also, is Watson’s unusual and respectful inclusion of the names of other-ranks soldiers which in turn enabled me to use them within Major Tom’s War. I hope their descendants in India and Pakistan will recognise their forebears and be proud.
I loved David Omissi’s meticulous Indian Voices of the Great War (1999). I found within its pages a letter sent from Risaldar Major Amar Singh, whom readers of Major Tom’s War will encounter many times. It reads: “What news can I give you but the following: Many bridegrooms whose thoughts were with their brides have passed away. Many other men have struggled with death like fluttering pigeons. Their widows are weeping, since nothing but sorrow remains for them on earth. Many who were met by the cannon’s blast have passed silently beyond, as one sails away in a ship.” Whether this is a quotation from a poet (which I suspect it is) or are words of his own, their use demonstrates the intelligence of this devout man who was Tom’s friend and comrade and acted as Granthi to the Sikhs on the Western Front. His letter passed the censors. Many others, less metaphorically critical, did not.
It was Tom’s unlucky fate to be the officer in charge of more than one execution. We tend to think of executions in terms of the victim without giving much thought to their impact on the often-reluctant executioner. For corroborative details on this horrific duty of my grandfather’s, I referred a good deal to this sobering read: Blindfold and Alone: British Military Executions in the Great War written by Cathryn Corns and John Hughes-Wilson (2002).
There are so many good non-fiction books jostling for fifth place but again I am going to be controversial. If the last time you read Great War poetry was at school, it is high time you read it again. Poetry and military history fiction can shed a vivid light on the realities of army life: just read Brian Gardner’s Up the Line to Death: the War Poets 1914 – 1918 if you need convincing!
A book I would like to see written – whether as fiction or non-fiction - is one which charts in detail the post-Great War life of one of the valiant professional Indian Army soldiers who fought so bravely for their colonial overlords during the Great War, only to be caught up in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre (also known as the Massacre at Amritsar) on 13 April 1919. It is such a breathtakingly short time after the war ended – just five short months later. This simple ‘what happened next?’ is so often missing from our understanding of human conflict. How did ordinary people carry on afterwards? How did it change them? What happened to this man, and to his family? It was a shameful betrayal to which Tom, my grandfather, must have reacted with grief and rage.