SUFFERING IN SILENCE by Linda Gillard

My father, Charles Gillard

My father lost his leg at the age of 19 whilst serving in France with the Royal Artillery. His bullet-shattered leg was amputated in a field hospital and he was lucky to be one of the early beneficiaries of penicillin. From an early age, I grew up with tales of horror and heroism told as I sat at my father’s (artificial) knee, but thanks to his macabre Spike Milligan-esque sense of humour, Dad’s war stories were full of black comedy and devoid of self-pity.

His own father had come home physically intact from the trenches of WWI, but of his experiences on the Western Front we knew nothing, since he never spoke of them, not even to his wife.

So it was possibly on the cards that one day I would write a novel about a soldier. But the aspect of military service I’ve written about is one that, if Dad had understood, he wouldn’t have wanted to discuss. Nor would he have heard it talked about much. Dad might have referred to “shell-shock”, but he wouldn’t have had much sympathy for it. In his day, you just “got on with it”. 

Apparently British servicemen and -women still “get on with it”. The military veterans’ charity, COMBAT STRESS reports that the average time it takes for a veteran to seek help for post-traumatic stress disorder is thirteen years. I’m going to repeat that, just in case you missed the salient points: the average time it takes for a mentally ill veteran to seek help is thirteen years.

I didn’t know that appalling statistic when I started writing my fifth novel, UNTYING THE KNOT. What I did know – and thought as many people as possible ought to know – was that 256 British servicemen died in the Falklands War, but at the last count, more than 300 have committed suicide since they returned home.

So for a variety of reasons, I decided to write a book ­– of all things a dark romantic comedy – in which the hero, Magnus, is a military veteran (ex-bomb-squad), suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and the heroine, Fay, is his long-suffering ex-wife. She narrates much of the novel and here she talks about the strain of being an army wife:

“You learn to live with the idea that your husband might die in combat, or even accidentally, as a result of handling ordnance or so-called friendly fire. You know he might pay the ultimate price. What you don’t reckon with – how can you, until you actually live with it? – is the daily toll that knowledge takes on a marriage, on your happiness, even your sanity.

That’s how it is for a regular soldier’s wife, but Magnus’ job was in EOD. Explosive Ordnance Disposal. Bomb squad, in layman’s terms. The initials also stand for “Everyone’s divorced”, referring to the fate of many of the marriages. The cracks began to show in ours. I told Magnus if he wanted us to stay together, he’d have to leave the army. I said I couldn’t cope any more with the long separations, his moods, the terrifying flashbacks, the his’n’hers nightmares. It was easier for me to say all that than admit the real reason I wanted him to quit. Magnus deserved the truth and probably could have handled it, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that I wasn’t prepared to spend any more of my life waiting to become a widow.

In the end it was taken out of our hands. In 1994 he was blown up by a booby-trapped bomb in Londonderry. Surgeons and psychiatrists pieced him back together again, but Magnus said the bastards had had eight of his nine lives, so he was quitting while he was ahead. Once he’d recovered from his injuries, he began training men to do the job he used to do. He stuck it for a couple of years, then resigned. I was relieved he’d finally made the break, but he became profoundly depressed and his nightmares (which we now knew were symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder) got worse. The doctors knew what was wrong with him and the cause, but they appeared to have no idea how to treat it. (Magnus used to joke that the military had in fact made great strides in their understanding of PTSD. Now when a soldier went to pieces, they no longer took him out and shot him.)

9/11 changed the world and it changed Magnus. He sat for days watching the same footage of the catastrophe, saying nothing, his face completely impassive. I feared the worst. Then some of his old army mates got in touch and told him they were off to Afghanistan. They asked him what he was doing with himself. He said he was going to find a ruined castle and restore it.”

That in essence is what UNTYING THE KNOT is about: a ruined castle (Tullibardine Tower, a 16^th century tower house on a Perthshire hillside), a ruined marriage, shattered lives and minds, and their restoration.

Kindle e-book £1.90/$2.99

My father died in 2005, so I’ll never know what he would have thought of my novel. I doubt he would have approved. He would have thought it was making a fuss. He thought doing your bit meant suffering in silence. (Apologies for all the clichés, but that’s how a man of his generation talked about pain and self-sacrifice.)

But Dad would surely have approved of UNTYING THE KNOT becoming another Kindle bestseller, which thanks to one of Amazon’s promotional emails, it has. (Great to see Amazon doesn’t discriminate between indie and mainstream e-books. Their selection criterion appears to be good reviews.)

The manuscript of UTK did the rounds with editors for two years and was universally rejected, even by those who raved over the writing and the characterisation. The genre was mixed (well, yes, decidedly) and one editor said the book was “rather earnest”. (And there was me thinking I was being cutting edge, writing a romantic black comedy about mental illness!) So I went the indie route and published it myself on Kindle. Because I really think someone should make a fuss.

The charity COMBAT STRESS refers to post-traumatic stress disorder as “the enemy within”. Our servicemen and -women deserve our support and understanding. They fight our wars. We should help them fight their battles.

COMBAT STRESS (www.combatstress.org.uk) delivers dedicated treatment and support to ex-servicemen and women with conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression and anxiety disorders.  Their services are free of charge to veterans.