I believe in serendipity. I believe that at the very moment when I have abandoned hope of ever again being possessed of an idea interesting enough to write about, that constellations are moving in my favour . . .
I am sitting in the back seat of the car, looking at the back of my father's head. I am seven, I think. I don't know where we are going. I notice a rectangular lump in Dad's neck, not discoloured, just a lump, about one quarter of an inch long. I touch it and ask him what it is.
"Shrapnel," Dad replies.
Funny how these moments stand out. "Shrapnel" is a good strong word, not one you forget, especially when its meaning is explained. Dad told me in subsequent discussions that he had shrapnel in his backside too, and the marks of German machine-gun bullets at the back of one knee. He told me that all his wounds were in various places behind because he had been running away. That was a good joke. I used to tease him about it. But deep down I knew, as every boy does, that no way did my old man run away from anyone. Parents are to one's life what the wallpaper is to a room. Taken for granted. And if this is true, then one's parents' past is like the lining paper. Although I was aware of the fact that Dad had fought in the second World War, and that he had landed on D-Day, it was never discussed during my growing up. He had left the British Army after the war with the rank of major. He had been given medals. But that was it. Sometimes a name would come up and my father and mother would laugh quietly at the memories it brought back. I sometimes heard them talking about the greatest party in the history of the world: London, VE Day, May 8th, 1945. But what about the kind of action that today people like Steven Spielberg can bring to your screen? It was never discussed.
Personal histories slip away like that, sand through our fingers. My knowledge of my father's war was no greater at 27 or 37 than it had been at age seven. The details simply never arose. If I wondered at all about why such huge events were never discussed in our house, I probably put it down to indifference on Dad's part; I doubt if I ever imagined that his silence on the subject could be the result of pain.
In 1987 my parents moved from Waterford to Dublin. In the subsequent clearing out of personal belongings, we were given a grandfather clock, some furniture and a few boxes containing, I thought, old chinaware that had been my grandmother's. The boxes were stored away. Life went on. Then one day in 1993, six years after my parents' move, our youngest son, Ben, then aged seven, discovered in the cupboard of his bedroom a box full of old documents. When he told me, I thought he had come across some old books or road maps, but the child's face suggested otherwise. I went to look. Two hours later I was still going through what Ben had found. Maps, scores and scores of them, of towns in France and Germany. Caen. Thaon. Goch. Scale 1:25,000. In purple, "TOP SECRET" and, "This map will NOT be carried in operational aircraft". Some of these maps had been printed on the back of British Ordnance Survey maps due to a lack of paper. Amersfoort in Holland was on the reverse side of Tunbridge Wells. The detail was fascinating. On the actual map of Ouistreham beach ("Sword"), used for the landings, could be seen enemy gun emplacements, weapon pits, radar stations, anti-tank walls, culverts, quarries, whether or not fields were cultivated, the condition of the ground either side of a stream or river - all were marked in different colours and with different symbols.
More: a notification from July 1944 from a major-general in Field Headquarters somewhere in the Battle of Normandy - the terse "Dear Cunningham" - informing my father that he had been awarded the Military Cross. "For distinguished services during the assault". Would it have meant anything to my father had he known then, or subsequently, that he was the only Irishman so decorated for "services" on D-Day? I doubt it.
Ben's box yielded up Army Training manuals, a chart that told you how to read the phases of the moon, an invitation to a victory dance in 1945 to be held "somewhere in Germany", and further correspondence on flimsy sheets of onion paper, informing my father that the French had awarded him the Croix de Guerre. At the bottom of this modest grocer's carton the real jewel was found: sheet after sheet of meticulously typed dispatches, written by over 20 officers including my father, and NCOs, describing from each man's point of view what had taken place on the morning of June 6th 1944, D-Day. Ben's box was a treasure trove. It contained a rare archive of one section of one of the greatest battles in history. It was as though Dad, years ago, had consigned his memory of those brutal hours to this box.
Many of the contents of Ben's box were, literally, disintegrating. The manuscript conservation department of Trinity College, Dublin, expressed interest in acquiring the archive, to safeguard in Ireland this unique record of one Irishman's war. Dad said he couldn't care less. A few months later, somewhat bemused, but probably a little proud as well, he presented the contents of Ben's box to Trinity.
Dad landed at 0710 hrs on the morning of D-Day on Sword beach, with the 79th Assault Squadron of the Royal Engineers. What they encountered is depicted vividly in the opening sequences of Saving Private Ryan - resistance of a ferocity rarely found in recorded battle history. Like many of the men in his squadron, my father had never seen action until that morning.
The 79th Armoured Division had been formed in 1942 with the express purpose of clearing the Normandy beaches to make way for infantry, and to "gap" the German defences on the beach headlands. Among all the divisions in the Allied Armies, the 79th was unique. Its units and equipment had no parallel in any other army in the world. They had developed tanks to deal with the tasks specific to Normandy - arms welded out on the front of Churchills for flailing up the beaches, detonating mines. They perfected techniques for carrying immense bundles of poles ("fascines"), to be dropped into anti-tank trenches, which they could then drive across. For larger trenches they carried metal bridges, twice their own length. They were amphibious. Instead of guns, many of them were fitted with cannons, known as petards. These were used to literally blast through Rommel's concrete defences. My father may have been unforthcoming over the years about the details of D-Day, but the dispatches are meticulous in detail. Captain Desanges is killed at 0830, Captain Ayres at 0832. As two-thirds of the Allied tanks lay crippled from mines and mortars on the open beach of Ouistreham, the German snipers picked off the survivors for target practice. My father's tank was immobilised, so he led a party of men to clear a path up the beach. By hand. At 12 noon it was all over. The Germans had surrendered. 900 allied soldiers lay dead on Sword. But over on Omaha the number was 3000.
The British Army's philosophy of modified tanks first clearing the way for infantry was the opposite to the American approach. These American deaths shook Eisenhower to his core. It made him hesitate in the advance on Caen, a city that could have been taken on June 7th by the British alone, since the Germans were still rushing to reinforce it. But Eisenhower hesitated and Caen, finally reinforced, did not fall to the Allies until July 9th.
Dad told me once, on holidays in France, that he and his troop had been in the centre of Caen at lunchtime on June 7th and had encountered soldiers from a Yorkshire regiment there. But the orders were to return to the coast and he did so. I used the unique material in this archive for the central part of Consequences of the Heart, bridging the gap between the very technical and often obscure language of the dispatches and the readiness of the modern reader to absorb detailed information. Almost all the equipment and endless accoutrements used in the landing no longer exist. And in Normandy itself, apart from the odd, crumbling German emplacement, only the vast cemeteries remain to tell of the scale of the sacrifice which was needed to liberate Europe. The characters in my book are in no way based on my father or his experiences, but their actions are all inspired by the contents of a box I once thought contained only cups and saucers.
Consequences of the Heart is published by Harvill in hardback at stg £15.99 and in trade paperback at stg £10.99.