Published by graham on Mon, 04/20/2026 - 12:49
PREY: where it came from
My dad was the oldest in a family of five kids. The second youngest was Ivor. I’d have called him Uncle Ivor but I never had the chance because he was killed in the war, sixteen months before I was born. He, like my dad, served in the RAF. My dad, to my great good fortune, survived. Ivor didn’t.
Our family never had much inclination to talk about young Ivor, and I always wondered why. He’d married and had a baby – my cousin Roger – before his death in action on a raid to Stuttgart. He was a Sergeant Air Bomber with a cramped seat in the nose of a Lancaster and was killed when the doomed aircraft crashed into no. 23 Fuchseck Strasse on the night of 24 July, 1944. The entire crew were buried in the war cemetery at Durnbach, south of Munich.
At home when I was a kid, Ivor’s name would occasionally come up, sparking an exchange of looks and sombre nods of the head, and I always got the impression that he was either a scoundrel, born wicked, or had been some kind of disappointment, but in retrospect I think neither is true. Instead, he served as our family’s contribution to a war that exacted a savage price, and that a discreet silence best honoured his memory. My parent’s generation tip-toed around the more intimate tragedies, though my cousin Colin has been tireless in disinterring the smallest print of both their war and the peace that followed.
Whatever the truth, I definitely inherited a fixation with both war and aviation in my familial DNA. Early on, I fell in love with books and was lucky enough to surf the wave of fiction and non-fiction that burst out of that same upheaval. We had no television at home, and I spent most winter evenings in bed, nursing a pretend headache and a pile of read-me loans from Clacton-on-Sea library.
The latter included most of the titles that shaped the imaginations of kids like me – The Cruel Sea, Reach for the Sky, The Wooden Horse – and when I began to nurse an ambition to become a writer, my planned narratives predictably hurried from incident to incident, scene to scene, in what I imagined was a thoroughly warlike 324way.
The emphasis was on movement, stuff happening, an unceasing drumbeat of events designed to surprise, challenge and bewilder, a combination that I fancied the likes of my sadly lost would-be uncle would have had to confront. What was missing, of course, were the long intervals of bitterly cold ennui that must trademark any posting to Bomber Command, but my writerly self could never image readers interested in sheer boredom, no matter how chilly, and so I stuck to the biff and the bang.
Then, after university, I somehow found myself in the world of television. That led me to a twenty-year career in making documentaries, many predictably rooted in conflicts of one kind and another, and I began to spend serious time listening to veterans who’d served at the sharp end in a variety of wars before deciding how best an hour of screen time could do justice to their memories.
Then came the Falklands War. I was working at Television South and we found ourselves in the eye of the storm. Thatcher wanted the islands back and the Royal Navy hastily did her bidding. A makeshift task force sailed from my home city of Portsmouth, and the harbour mouth walls were thick with families and girlfriends waving Union Jacks.
I was tasked with making a same-day film that Monday, and we were pushed to meet the transmission deadlines. When we got to the moment of departure, the temptation was to quickly lard the sequence with oompah music, the soundtrack of fierce patriotism, but I’d been with our camera crews on Hot Walls at noon and had sensed a very different mood. People, especially the women, were fearful. Bad stuff was all too likely to happen. Maybe their menfolk wouldn’t be coming back. And so I went for something far more ominous, a decision I’ve never regretted.
Why?
Ten years later I was commissioned to make a series of films looking back on that neat little war. There were six episodes and one of them featured a paratrooper. A decade after fighting at Goose Green he was driving a taxi in Plymouth. We spent a couple of evenings together and he began to open up. Once the islands were ours again, he and his mates were flown back to the UK where he found himself amongst civvies delirious with victory-fever, buying him drinks, demanding to know what it had been like to give the Argies a hammering.
These invitations he treated at face value. His accounts were thoughtful and extremely honest. They had nothing to do with gleeful bloodlust but offered a painfully honest account of the realities of combat, how hard it was to describe, how horrible it was to experience, but he knew from the blankness of the faces around him that this wasn’t at all what his new civvie friends were after.
They wanted cartoon heroics and piles of Argie dead. Instead, they found themselves looking at PTSD. In the end, he told me later, he concluded that the only people who truly knew about the unspeakable awfulness of Goose Green were the Argies themselves. The experience of battle, he said, is a well-kept secret. If folk knew what it really felt like, what it really did to you, wars would never happen.
That took me back to Ivor, the dead Sergeant Air Bomber who never lived to become my uncle, and when I got published and began to write full-time, I inevitably strayed into war after war. That led to the current series, The Spoils of War, set in the Thirties and Forties.
The series has no single protagonist. Instead, it relies on a mix of fictional characters who come and go from book to book, intermixing with some of the Second World War’s key players, British, German, Russian and American. The fictional characters, as they should, give me licence to explore corners of the war that still fascinate me, and one of them is Bomber Command.
Ivor Hurley would never have met Tam Moncrieff or Albert Murray because they never existed. But I hope and pray that he would recognise the tally of savage mental wounds that war inflicted on those who fought it. In real life, and in my fiction, some survive, and many don’t. But dying, I’ve come to realise, can sometimes be one of God’s favours because wars have an ugly habit of leaving an inner mutilation that never heals. To get through, in short, can turn into a life sentence.
Sergeant Air Bomber Ivor, just maybe, was lucky.