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Introduction
CHAPTER 1. Kirk’s Early Years
CHAPTER 2. Kirk Leaves the Workhouse
CHAPTER 3. Lipton’s Grocery Store
CHAPTER 4. Vera and Kirk’s First Date
CHAPTER 5. Kirk is missing
CHAPTER 6. Vera Meets Martha
CHAPTER 7. Julie Tracks Down O’Hara
CHAPTER 8. The Tiger Lady Calls
CHAPTER 9. Vera Walks out
CHAPTER 10. Vera Learns the Truth
CHAPTER 11. The Chance Meeting
CHAPTER 12. Kirk’s Second Honeymoon
CHAPTER 13. The Reunion Party
CHAPTER 14. The Lost Diploma
CHAPTER 15. The School Photographs
CHAPTER 16. Janice Finds a Friend
CHAPTER 17. Confusion at the MOD
CHAPTER 18. The Diploma Is a Fake
CHAPTER 19. Janice Finds Her Husband
CHAPTER 20. The Missing Persons Bureau
CHAPTER 21. Michael Goes to Larne
CHAPTER 22. Janice and Charlotte Meet
CHAPTER 23. The Paternity Test
CHAPTER 24. Party Day
CHAPTER 25. The Suicide Bridge
The First World War ended in 1918. There was joy in the streets despite the fact that almost all essential goods were in short supply. The country had endured a horrific loss of lives. Trench warfare involved bombardment of enemy lines followed by infantry attacks. Soldiers leapt out of the trenches into machine-gun fire, gaining only a few yards of territory, or dying where they fell.
The prime minister had promised a country, ‘Fit for heroes to live in.’ But the four million servicemen who returned to civilian life found little glory. Food shortages and limited coal supplies for heating lowered the resistance to an influenza epidemic which caused the death of 150,000 people nationwide. Soldiers returned home to find little support or little chance of finding work. Some of the veterans were reduced to selling matches on street corners to earn a living. It was also a particularly blustery day that ended the Great War as it was called. ‘The War to end all Wars!’ they said, but it had also ended so many other things as social structures collapsed, women had become emancipated, governments fell, and some nations had changed their borders whilst others had changed their old loyalties and allegiances. The soldiers who were in the trenches came home. Everyone had their fill of death. They wanted to live in peace now. Yet all the stark reminders of the war remained. The maimed victims had to be cared for, the wounded were still dying and the shell-shocked creatures from the trenches still went mad, or wrote Poetry, well after the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918 Great Britain.
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Kirk Hansen
A Man
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