Alex Smith is a figment of my imagination. Or is he?
1946: Ex-RAF pilots, unable to discuss their war with family, regale an enthralled six-year-old ‘boy therapist’ from next door. Me. The composite person about whom they spoke had no name but to me he was real. In my story, amnesiac due to severe head trauma, one of the characters gives my character the name Alex Smith as a means of identity.
A Tale From A Time Long Past is a poignant love story, bringing together two people separated by war, lost to each other for sixty years. It has cruel but contextual passages relating to treatment of prisoners by the Gestapo, and does not resile from the violence of aerial warfare, but the story always returns to a love that never died.
Alex, in his eighties, has no memory of his life prior to the last year of WW2. He reads about an elderly English woman who finds her sister in Adelaide after sixty years. Their story is evocative; Alex flies from Launceston to England to meet Sian Murray, who explains they’d been wartime lovers.
Development of the two main characters, Alex and Sian, continues through to the last page, the final four words bringing the whole story together in a scene from 1952… or is it 1944…?
A friend, a Viet Vet, has enduring psychosomatic amnesia. I ‘borrowed’ this for background. His four decade battle became the unique filament (I know of no-one else using it in this way) weaving together the older man in my story and his younger self.
1946: Ex-RAF pilots, unable to discuss their war with family, regale an enthralled six-year-old ‘boy therapist’ from next door. Me. The composite person about whom they spoke had no name but to me he was real. In my story, amnesiac due to severe head trauma, one of the characters gives my character the name Alex Smith as a means of identity.
A Tale From A Time Long Past is a poignant love story, bringing together two people separated by war, lost to each other for sixty years. It has cruel but contextual passages relating to treatment of prisoners by the Gestapo, and does not resile from the violence of aerial warfare, but the story always returns to a love that never died.
Alex, in his eighties, has no memory of his life prior to the last year of WW2. He reads about an elderly English woman who finds her sister in Adelaide after sixty years. Their story is evocative; Alex flies from Launceston to England to meet Sian Murray, who explains they’d been wartime lovers.
Development of the two main characters, Alex and Sian, continues through to the last page, the final four words bringing the whole story together in a scene from 1952… or is it 1944…?
A friend, a Viet Vet, has enduring psychosomatic amnesia. I ‘borrowed’ this for background. His four decade battle became the unique filament (I know of no-one else using it in this way) weaving together the older man in my story and his younger self.
