When I first decided that I wanted to write a novel set during the Second World War I rather grandiosely believed that I could somehow cover the whole conflict in less than half the length of War and Peace. When I realized this was too daunting a challenge—for both reader and writer—I chose the two aspects of the war that interested me most and which I thought provided the richest material—the London Blitz and the strategic bombing campaign against Germany. Life After Life is about Ursula Todd and what she goes through during the Blitz, while A God in Ruins (I like to think of it as a “companion” piece rather than a sequel) is about Ursula’s brother Teddy and his life as a Halifax pilot in Bomber Command. Neither novel is exclusively about the war, indeed in both novels we spend a long time either arriving at the outbreak of hostilities or dealing with the aftermath. Nonetheless it is Ursula’s and Teddy’s individual and shared experiences of the war that permeate their lives.
Ursula lived many versions of her life in the previous novel, which gave me a certain freedom when it came to Teddy’s own life, many of the details of which are different in this book. I like to think of A God in Ruins as one of Ursula’s lives, an unwritten one. This sounds like novelist trickery, as indeed it perhaps is, but there’s nothing wrong with a bit of trickery.
Teddy captains a Halifax and so it goes almost without saying that he is stationed in Yorkshire where most of the Halifax airfields were situated. (The Lancaster gets all the glamour and glory. I would refer you to Teddy’s grumbles on this subject rather than mine.) Teddy’s Halifax is part of Bomber Command No. 4 Group, one of two groups based in Yorkshire (the other was No. 6 Group—the RCAF). I am never specific about this, nor have I tied Teddy down to a named airfield or squadron, in order to allow myself a little authorial latitude. I imagined him, however, as part of 76 Squadron and I used the squadron’s operational records (in the National Archives) when it was based either at Linton-on-Ouse or at Holme-on-Spalding Moor as a guide for his war.
For the reader’s interest, I have appended a short bibliography of some of the sources that I used for this novel. I read many vivid first-hand accounts of individual aircrew’s experience to which I am indebted; histories and accounts that draw on personal experiences, as well as the more official histories. The stories of the men who served in Bomber Command are all extraordinary, documenting as they do not only the prized virtue of stoicism but a heroism and determination (and modesty) that seem almost alien to us nowadays, although of course we have not been tested the way they were. The average age of these men (boys, really), all volunteers, was twenty-two. They experienced some of the worst combat conditions imaginable and fewer than half of them survived. (Of aircrew flying at the beginning of the war, only 10 percent would see the end of it.) One cannot fail to be moved by the sacrifice of their lives and I suppose that was what first impelled me to write this novel.
There is nothing that happens during the chapters set during the war in A God in Ruins that isn’t in some way based on a real-life incident that I came across in the course of my research (even the most horrific, even the most outlandish), although nearly always modified in some way. It is sometimes difficult to remember that you are writing fiction, not history, as it is only too easy to get caught up in the finer (and not so finer) technicalities, but the needs of the novel should always trump one’s own peculiar obsessions. The Bristol Hercules engine became mine but that, too, I handed on to Teddy.