Brothers in Arms

This is a story of how a book was written. A shaggy dog story, admittedly, but true. 

It begins more than ten years ago. Whenever I got out of the car on those long drives to Sydney I limped for the first 50 metres. My right Achilles tendon had seized up. Eventually a heel spur began to grow steadily on my right heel. I did not connect the two symptoms. People who should have known better told me the spur would most likely disappear as mysteriously as it appeared. Several years ago the pain in my right heel began to wake me from my sleep, often several times a night, just from the pressure of my heel on the mattress. Invigorating morning walks with my neighbour were abandoned. It hurt too much. 

Belatedly I discovered this was not purely an ageing problem. It had something to do with the genes (the structure of the foot bones, the tightness of the Achilles tendon) and young people can suffer too. The ‘high heels’ of my younger days at the office made it worse, as has the subsequent wearing of ‘flatties’ with an enclosed heel. With one foot always slightly bigger than the other, that heel is rubbed more tightly by the shoe back and sets up chronic inflammation. 

Three months ago I seized the day and had an operation, termed 'correction of Haglund's Syndrome and gastroc lengthening'. The surgeon reported afterwards that my heel was a big mess – the inflammation had widely calcified and so had part of the Achilles tendon. The excess bone was sawn away and the tendon repaired as much as possible. The slow road to recovery meant crutches, a moon boot and sitting around for several months with my foot ‘up’ – literally. Not easy when you live alone. 

My youngest sister Cathy abandoned her husband, garden and farm animals and came to stay as my nurse for the first week. So kind. So thoughtful. Four different neighbours did my shopping and collected mail for me over the next few months. Bless them. Friends called in for cups of tea. The company was appreciated. I hated being stuck at home but that cloud did have a silver lining  - the whole experience proved that my house will be user-friendly when I reach my dotage. It’s small and easy to look after. It has no steps. My ensuite has an accessible shower. A high stool in the bathroom and another in the kitchen meant I could reach everything and perform all essential daily tasks. Note to self – ‘never sell this house’. 

But, what was I going to do to pass the time as a temporary invalid? TV has its definite limits. Unusually, I wasn’t in much mood for reading. After a general anaesthetic, with a painful foot, at first I couldn’t focus on anything approaching creative writing either. I remembered the letters my grandmother’s two Boulton brothers wrote home to their mother in World War 1. Nigel Boulton happened to be in London when war erupted and served as a doctor with the British Army. Commonwealth Banker Stephen Boulton became an artillery man with the AIF. Many WW1 soldiers sent letters home, or postcards with a few lines scrawled on them, but it’s rare to find a set of letters like these, literate, from two brothers in different armies, telling the story of that appalling war from start to finish. The letters were typed in the 1920s and a copy was presented to the Australian War Memorial which promptly requested the originals. 

I’d previously had our family's typed copies scanned with OCR (optical character recognition) to create a Word document, the same process as the National Library of Australia uses to digitise old newspapers and publish them on Trove. Since old and faded typefaces don’t scan well, thousands of OCR mistakes occurred, as in the example (where the original typing and spelling was correct and the address At Sea became 21T). Every single line on every page of the Boulton files had to be read and corrected where necessary. It was an excellent if tedious project on which to focus when my brain wasn’t working properly. 

The task took me over. I dropped out of the world for several months and sat on my couch, awkwardly juggling computer, mouse, mouse pad and fragile original documents against which I checked the OCR, along with crutches and moon boot. The letters were later interwoven chronologically and some brief introductions were written to help the story flow.

A book emerged. It had the tentative title of Stout-hearted Men. Remember that stirring song from the 1940 show New Moon? Its rousing chorus repeated in my brain for months. Led by Nelson Eddy it goes: 

Give me some men who are stout-hearted men, 

Who will fight, for the right they adore, 

Start me with ten who are stout-hearted men, 

And I'll soon give you ten thousand more. 

Shoulder to shoulder and bolder and bolder, 

They grow as they go to the fore. 

Then, there's nothing in the world, can halt or mar a plan, 

When, stout-hearted men, can stick together man to man. 

Those words seemed so apt for a book about the Great War, when millions marched off in enthusiastic support of their cause, but too many people today don’t know what 'stout-hearted' means. I road-tested other titles:

• Mummy’s Boys – ironical of course, my grandmother’s brothers were anything but! 

• Mother’s Boys – Nigel was quite formal. 

• Matee’s Boys – Stephen, more of an Aussie, combined the Latin word for mother (Mater) and the word ‘mate’ to address his letters to ‘Dear Matee’. 

• Dolly’s Boys – their mother Dora was known as Dolly. 

Nothing resonated with family and friends until my daughter suggested Brothers in Arms. 'That’s what the book’s about, Mum!’ So that’s the current working title. What do you think? Despite the centenary deluge of World War 1 material, I hope to interest a publisher in the Boulton story. It has a theme and it sucks the reader in to that whirlpool of a hundred years ago.

P.S. I'm still limping, but free of pain and improving week by week.

UPDATE, 30 Nov 2015. My agent and I agreed that commercial publishers had planned their offerings for the centenary of WW1 long ago, so I decided to self-publish this book, which is now available through BookPOD.