What’s the WIP?

You can see I’m getting to grips with some of the writing lingo here; the WIP is my Work In Progress. I don’t have a running title for the book yet (it keeps changing depending on which way the wind’s blowing, but I should pin something down I suppose) so until then it is ‘Neil’s WIP’.

I had the idea for the book after spending several years in my spare time finding out the family history for both my maternal and paternal sides. One person in particular who stood out was great uncle Basil (one of my mother’s uncles) who, so my mother always said, went down with his ship in the Great War. A bit of searching found out that he did indeed die fighting in World War One but in the deserts of Mesopotamia rather than on board a ship. Incidentally an antecedent did go down with his ship, but that was one of my mother’s cousins and during World War Two.

Between 2014 and 2018 the events of World War One are very topical as we acknowledge all the inherent centenaries there. One thing that has struck me though is that, other than Gallipoli, the events in Mesopotamia and the war against the Turkish Empire have had little acknowledgement, the events of France and Flanders mostly taking precedent. So my book is a fictional account of Basil’s journey; from a typical lad born into a large working class family in Salford through to his last battle at the age of just 18 in the assault on Falahiyen. The war diary for Basil’s battalion states that this was a particularly vicious battle with intense Turkish rifle fire.

As well as being involved in the physical fighting in WW1 Basil also has his own internal struggle going on as he copes with being true to himself in a time that could see him derided, banished as a pariah or even incarcerated. This part is pure fiction and speculation on my part…more later.