Robert Moran, Private

Robert’s father, Jacko Moran, was a World War One hero, winner of the V.C. But Robert only has memories of an abusive childhood with a drunken father. Robert joins the army in 1940, as a private. He wants to get away from his father but the hero-image and the haunting bitter reality of war follows him. Robert is too much his father’s son. He has the same skills, the same bitter memories. Unconsciously he falls into his father’s pattern. Fighting on the same battlefields, he finds himself beginning to understand how battlefield trauma can affect – even shadow – a man. On the limitless empty sands of the Quattara depression, amid the bustling gaudy mobs of Cairo and Alexandra – and at a little railway siding called El Alamein – Robert finds destiny and understanding. Like his father, he realises that war is suffered by soldiers and fought by soldiers. Robert finds brief romance with a cynical but perceptive English nurse whose aristocratic connections give her a slant on war that Robert knows nothing about. Self-centered political machinations that have nothing to do with the postured ideals of war. Then, wounded at El Alamein, Robert goes to Italy. There Robert fights a different war. Taken prisoner, a hair’s-breadth escape from a train and finding shelter among Italian mountain villagers. And love with Mirellia, a shy wide-eyed peasant girl.

* Ages 13+