It took me far too long to read it but I have finally finished "The Soldier's Return" by Melvyn Bragg. It is a novel laced with autobiographical elements and as the title might suggest, it's about a soldier who has returned from war. Specifically, Sam Richardson has come back to Cumberland in the northwest of England from wartime in Burma where he witnessed unspeakable things.
He tries to settle back into his old life with his young wife Ellen and their little son Joe who was but a baby when World War II was declared. Sam is restless and bad-tempered, finding it hard to pick up where he left off. He comes close to running away to Australia but abandons that plan at the very last minute, clearing the way for a sequel.
I could go into detail about the plot but I won't bore you with that. Suffice it to say that I found the book all rather slow-moving and frustrating. I wanted to slap the writer and say, "Come on! Let's move on!" The language was well-chosen and there were some well-crafted passages but I didn't think that the novel convincingly peeled away the layers of the soldier's psychology nor did it really bring out Ellen's internal struggles.
It was as if Melvyn Bragg didn't quite know where he was going with it nor how he was going to get there.
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It made me think of an earlier war - World War One and two young soldiers who came back to Yorkshire from The Battle of the Somme. They were my paternal and maternal grandfathers - Philip and Wilfred. They did not know each other but they were on the same hellish battlefield and as I say, they both survived. I have often wondered what they brought home with them - after the terrible things they had witnessed.
Surely it would have been nigh on impossible to close that chapter of their lives and simply move on. Between July and November 1916 over 300,000 men were killed at The Somme and a further million suffered significant injuries. The number who suffered severe mental traumas is not recorded.
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/eg6P4H3