1971 brought the second of the three A Family At War novels. Here's a brief extract:It seemed to him [Edwin] that there was nothing left between them. No decency, no humanity, nothing that he believed in and that he had tried to live by.
It seemed to him to be a string of lies, a perpetual line of pretences and petty feuds.
An empty shell.
His family like lost people wandering around in the desert, miles away from each other, with the sun beating down slowly killing them, drying them out until they were shrivelled up into tiny balls of skin and bone.
And all of them having them lost the will to live.
War does terrible things to people, nobody would want to pretend otherwise, but there was no evidence in the book of the wartime spirit my grandparents told me about - of people helping each other.
