Читать книгу The Dreaded Workhouse - Danny McFaul - Страница 3

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.

But life still went on as Vera Roberts with the flaming red hair was born to parents who were jolted out of the traditional pattern of their lives in the Northern Irish Town of Larne. When the Great War ended, the whole country was full of young men like Vera’s father Kenneth who were looking for jobs. Lots of them were also painfully aware that they had wasted the best years of their lives in the service of their country. The country was also full of young women like Vera’s mother Mini Johnston, who had previously been living haphazardly with friends and relatives, only occasionally snatching a day or a weekend of fun whenever their husbands or boyfriends could get some time off. It was during one of these periods that Vera had been conceived and now at twenty-three years of age, she met a young man at the local grocery store. She fell in love and married the young man Kirk Hansen who was attending college in order to gain a degree. Fate was not kind to Kirk and Vera and despite having a lovely daughter Charlotte, the marriage ended in divorce. Vera never remarried, but Kirk eventually became the husband of an old army pals widow, Janice Hopkins, who one day decided to organise a re-union party for her husband to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. Janice sets out to find his old army pals and schoolmates to invite to the reunion.

But the more Janice delved, the more confused she became as things about her husband’s past life didn’t fit in with what she was led to believe. Suspicion and doubt clouded her mind as she tried to uncover a past that it seemed had never existed. As time passed her problems had grown no lighter. It was as though she herself bore the guilt for her husband’s past. Janice was torn between the new husband that she loved and wanted to keep and the stranger that he was becoming, as she began to wonder ‘Who is this man.’

The Life

and

Death of

Kirk Hansen

A Man

Haunted by Stigma

and Guilt