Martin Allen, chairman of Shoreham’s Ropetackle, is in print with Love and War (Naval and Military Press, available from the publishers, from Amazon and from Waterstones).
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00:00Good morning, it's always really lovely to speak to Martin Allen, who is the Chairman
00:05of the Rope Tackle, fabulous venue in Shoreham, but this time I'm talking to Martin about
00:10something rather different. And Martin, you've written the most fascinating sounding book,
00:15a work of fiction, but it's based absolutely on the letters that your parents wrote to
00:20each other. What are these letters? How many years did they span?
00:25Well, it was a sort of accidental book in many ways, that after my father died some
00:3010 or 11 years ago, I discovered in a drawer in their bedroom about a thousand letters
00:40that they'd written to each other over the war years.
00:43And you had no idea?
00:45I had no idea at all. No, they'd been sort of courting before the war and started writing
00:52to each other when the war started. They, you know, the courtship developed. They were
01:00apart. You know, my father was in the army. My mother became a nurse. She was nursing
01:05in London, partly in the Blitz. So, you know, that side of it. But it's a sort of narrative
01:14of, you know, a relationship that then became marriage in 1941. Six years when they lived
01:23apart. Three of those years with the first child.
01:27That must have been fascinating to dive into, a treasure trove like that.
01:33Well, it was personal at one level, obviously, because it's my parents telling their story,
01:39much of which I didn't know. But it's also, it's an extraordinary insight into that time.
01:47And you know, understanding some of that reality of what life was like in those war years.
01:54You know, there are endless books and films and so on. But some of it is the sort of minutiae,
01:59you know, what was happening from my mother's point of view, you know, on the home front
02:04and all that. But just living that life there, you know, their meetings were brief when they
02:12got together, periods of leave. And then when he went off, he was in England until 1944
02:20and then went off to, you know, with the few days after the invasion. And for the next,
02:29the next two years, he was away. It feels almost a tragedy to discover this post-mortem.
02:37Or in a way, is it better that you know this now that they're no longer with us?
02:41I think that if they had still been around, I would have found some of it pretty uncomfortable
02:47because they were very graphic in their exchanges. I mean, one thing that was so interesting,
02:53and I'm sure it must have been quite common in, you know, in those times, was that their
02:59relationship, they sustained it through a lot of, you know, description to each other,
03:05most intimate descriptions. And it was like a sort of a written sexual relationship. And
03:13reading that about your own parents, I thought, you know, this, if they'd been around, I think
03:18I probably would have just… Fair enough, fair enough. But the letters are the basis,
03:24I believe, for a work of fiction, aren't they? Yes. I mean, the first stage of it was to sort
03:30them out, transcribe them, which I did as a sort of record for the family. And I got that printed
03:36just sort of as a private thing. But, you know, as I was doing it, realising it only told half
03:40the story. And then pause for thought. And in fact, fortuitously, it was in the second or third
03:48lockdown with plenty of time on my hands. I thought, right, can I imagine my way through the
03:55rest of it? It involved a lot of research, you know, some of the military research, some of the
04:00sort of the, what was going on with them and the family and so on. But the, and testing bits of it,
04:09you know, there were things that were sort of alluded to, things like, you know, my father
04:15telling my mother of temptation, you know, that the army as it made its way across Europe,
04:22you know, soldiers had all these opportunities. There were, you know, women there who were
04:28familiar with sort of, you know, offering themselves to German troops and so on. And
04:34temptation was sort of thrown at them. So, I wanted to sort of test that, picking up on those
04:40allusions. And so, I had to imagine that, which was quite tricky.
04:45So, have you fictionalised your parents or have they become someone else in this?
04:49No, no, I've used them, it's the real people. So, I've used their names. And I, you know,
04:54that again was something I had to work out. But no, it is real. And all the characters are real.
04:59Although the army, the army side of it, lots of names appear in the letters, and I've had to,
05:07but no characters, you know, so you had to imagine them. But the, I mean, there were two or three
05:12quite sort of interesting dimensions that came up when I was doing it. One of them was, you know,
05:21how, you know, a young man who, okay, he had got a lot of experience by the time he came to the end
05:26of the war, but then was part of that occupying army denazification programme, having to do things
05:35like sit in on one of the Belsen trials, and seeing, you know, through the evidence, actually
05:42face to face with these people who had been, who had run the concentration camp, seeing it at
05:49firsthand, and hearing all the all the evidence, which was, you know, the, the officers of the
05:56occupying army were required to go and do this, so that they could then, you know, feed that into
06:03the denazification programme. So that that was a fascinating part. But there was there was a sort
06:09of wider thing about the, you know, getting really into the, the reality that privations,
06:17the grimness of war, and then you think of what's going on in the current era, you know,
06:23how quickly generations forget. Absolutely. And Martin, it sounds absolutely fascinating.
06:30Available from the publishers, which is Naval and Military Press, and from Waterstones,
06:38it's Love and War by Martin Allen. Martin, congratulations and lovely to speak to you. Thank you.