Keep the Home Fires Burning

KEEP THE HOME FIRES BURNING is an attempt to describe life as it was in Radnorshire from the beginning of the 20th. Century until after the Great War and the effect the local atmosphere nourished in Tom, the chief protagonist, on whom the book is based. The title of the work is owed to Ivor Novello who would spend family holidays with Tom's parents when he was a child and whose own mother had graciously played the organ for Tom's parents' wedding-ceremony. In the book, Ivor's song becomes all the poignant as Tom, who has volunteered under-age for active service in the army, is marching through Boulogne en route for the trenches and the horrors yet to come. Miraculously (for not many young men survived as machine-gunners) he is brought safely through, abeit scarred and with a couple of enemy gunshot wounds to his leg but this is not the end of the story. As was so often the case when boys had been exposed to events too raw for prolonged discussion at home, once returned, Tom, unable to settle back beneath a semi-puritanical façade, finds he has become the actual outcast that unconsciously he must have always suspected himself to be: Ishmael. We leave him standing on the dock at Liverpool in early 1920 as a Remittance-Man to Canada.