The Line Between Us (25 page)

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Most people are familiar with the sinking of the
Titanic
in which fifteen hundred and seventeen people were drowned, and some have heard of the
Lusitania
which sank with the loss of eleven hundred and ninety-two souls. These two disasters are reputed to be among the worst in British maritime history, but until recently few people have known about the fate of the
Lancastria
, a Cunard liner requisitioned by the government to rescue the straggling remnants of the British Expeditionary Force from St Nazaire after the mass evacuation at Dunkirk. The ship was bombed by enemy fighters off the coast of Brittany and as nobody could be certain about the number of refugees who were on board, it is difficult to say how many died when it went down, but the lower estimates suggest around four thousand men.

The sinking occurred just as France capitulated to the Nazis and Marshal Pétain signed an armistice with Hitler, such a devastating blow to the Allied cause that Churchill felt the nation should be spared further bad news and slapped a D Notice on the subject, forbidding any reference to what had happened with the threat of prosecution under the Official Secrets act.

This meant that the men who died on the
Lancastria
and those who managed to survive the horrifying ordeal never received any acknowledgement of what they had been through and the sacrifice they made. In June 2015 on the seventy fifth anniversary of the disaster, following years of campaigning by veterans and their supporters to ensure that the loss should be officially recognized by the British government, a tribute was formally made in parliament, where it was announced that the French government had agreed to give the site of the wreck, still lying in the shipping lanes outside St Nazaire, legal protection.

This novel is a small and personal tribute to the bravery of those men.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I owe profound thanks to my husband Steve whose unstinting generosity gave me the time, space and encouragement that I needed to keep on writing; to my agent Laura Longrigg who never gave up on me, to my editor Amy Durant for having faith in my book, and to my mother for being utterly inspiring and holding me to account as a writer.

I’m also indebted to Zita Adamson for the intuition that she brought to early drafts, to Carole Pugh for her sustaining friendship, to the poet Deborah Harvey for her advice about autism, and to Dr Simon Robbins, Senior Archivist at the Imperial War Museum, for giving me access to invaluable first-hand accounts of the sinking of the
Lancastria
. Jonathan Fenby’s book
The Sinking of the Lancastria
was an invaluable resource as well.

Finally, I’m grateful to my father, staunch advocate, bedrock and sometime proof reader, who died in 2004 and would have loved to have read
The Line Between Us
.