Lord of the Nutcracker Men
Page 17
Cliffe is real. It's a charming little village beside the marshes of the Thames. On Christmas Day in 1914, a German airman really did drop a bomb near Cliffe's railway station. The raid wasn't quite as dramatic as Johnny tells it, as the aeroplanes didn't come so close to the ground. But visitors are still taken to see the place where the bomb came down.
There were men like Johnny's father who volunteered in October and were in the field by Christmas. But there weren't very many. In the first feverish weeks of the war, most of the volunteers joined the “new army” being raised by Lord Kitchener, a hero of the Boer War and— in 1914—Britain's secretary of state for war. While the generals thought the war would end quickly, Kitchener believed it would last three years and planned his recruitment for that. His thousands of volunteers spent months parading through streets and parks, while the “old army,” desperate for men, sent its few new recruits into battle as quickly as possible.
When Johnny's father arrived in France, the war was settling into its stalemate. The armies were only then beginning to build the elaborate trenches that would be their homes for four years. The strip of Europe that would be reduced to a wasteland was still dotted with farms and trees. But sectors of the front were just as described by Johnny's father. I have tried not to be influenced by the horrors that were yet to come, by the poison gas and flamethrowers and corpse-choked ground that were all unimagined in 1914.
Through it all, the mail went back and forth. The letters from Johnny's father may seem to come with unlikely regularity and impossible speed, but the truth is that they don't. Mail from the front was delivered in England within two or three days. The battlefield, for many British soldiers, was so close to home that it was heartbreaking.
An officer going on leave could have breakfast in the trenches and supper in a London hotel. The soldier at the front could read a newspaper just one day old. During the biggest barrages, the sound of guns was heard in England.
I imagine that my grandfather could hear them for the rest of his life.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book started as a Christmas story, as a simple tale of a boy and his wooden soldiers. It grew into what it is through the help of many people.
Bruce Wishart introduced me to nutcracker men. He shaped the figures, then helped shape the story through many conversations.
My parents provided answers to many questions about day-to-day life in Britain. When they didn't have the answer, my father found it. He provided books and research material, then corrected many mistakes that I'd made.
As with every book I've written, I owe thanks to my companion, Kristin Miller, and my agent, Jane Jordan Browne, and to the people at Random House, especially Françoise Bui. All of them provided much support and encouragement, as they always do.
But this story could not have been written without the help of Kathleen Larkin, a research librarian at the Prince Rupert Library. She spent countless hours immersed in the Great War, finding just the right book to answer the most obscure question, or the particular person who knew what even the books didn't tell. She even went to Cliffe and sent me pictures of a village that was far more lovely and picturesque than the one I'd imagined for myself.
These are just some of the people who answered her queries, who helped me portray a period that is, sadly, being quickly forgotten:
Mrs. Peggy Wise and Mr. David Wright, proprietors of Martins News in Cliffe, Kent.
Pat Leviston of Cliffe, Kent.
Michele Losse, research assistant at Post Office Heritage Services in London.
Major Vince Larocque, museum curator for the Canadian Military Engineers, in Vancouver.
Marion Webster of the Guildhall Museum in Rochester, Kent.
Angela Woollacott, professor, historian, and author, of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
Miss Eileen N. Hawkins, of the YWCA in London.
John A. Henshall, librarian, at the University of Warwick library in Coventry.
Barbara Ludlow of Hawkinge, Kent.
The staff of the Imperial War Museum, London.
Derek Reid of British Telecom Archives, London.
Sergeant Pilkington of the Philatelic Bureau of the British Forces Post Office in London.
Liliane Reid Lafleur and Ray White of the library of the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.
Penny McLaughlin, commemoration and public relations, Veterans Affairs Canada.
Jim Streckfuss, president of the League of World War I Aviation Historians.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Iain Lawrence studied journalism in Vancouver, British Columbia, and worked for small newspapers in the northern part of the province. He settled on the coast, living first in the port city of Prince Rupert and now on the Gulf Islands. An avid sailor, he wrote two nonfiction books about his travels on the coast before turning to children's novels. Lord of the Nutcracker Men was inspired, in part, by family stories of his grandfather, who served as a Lewis gunner on the Western Front during World War I.
Lawrence is the author of four other novels for young readers, including the acclaimed High Seas Trilogy: The Wreckers (an Edgar Allan Poe Award Nominee), The Smugglers, and The Buccaneers. Ghost Boy, set in postwar America, was named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, and an ALA Notable Book.
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