AFTER MIDNIGHT – Reading Guide:

The fog of war hides more than the dead...

In 1944, a Liberator bomber pilot writes a letter to his daughter on the occasion of her first birthday. He posts it moments before embarking on a mission to Domodossla in Northern Italy. Tragically he never returns and neither the wreckage of his plane not his body has ever been found.

In 1964, Linda Carr resolves to find out what happened to her father on that terrible night. It is a mystery that has haunted her all her life. She employs the help of motorcycle TT racer Jack Kirby, a man who has his own inner demons to combat. He was a Mosquito fighter pilot during the War and experienced at first hand the astonishing courage of the Italian partisans in the face of Nazi brutality. Jack is keen to find one of these partisans, a woman he fell passionately in love with all those years ago, someone with a past as dark as the secrets she still holds close to her heart.

Discussion questions:

1. This novel is inspired by a true story. What do you think about taking people’s lives and fictionalising them, whilst their relatives are still alive?
2. What do you think about the style in which the book is written, about the shift from the third to the first person as time moves from 1964 back to 1944?
3. Lindy Carr often speaks about knowing her father, yet he when left for war was she was just a baby. How has she built up such a strong impression of him and how true do you think that impression really is?
4. What do you think of the character of Francesca and where do her loyalties really lie?
5. What do you think about the contrast of the British setting, particularly the Isle of Man, and the Italian, both in 1944 and 1964?

Related websites:

www.robert-ryan.net

www.madaboutbooks.com

Other books by Robert Ryan:

Early One Morning
The Blue Noon
Night Crossing
Trans Am
Underdogs
Nil Mil

Suggested further reading:

Charlotte Gray – Sebastian Faulks
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
The Burning Blue – James Holland
Son of War – Melvyn Bragg
The Art of Falling – Deborah Lawrenson

Related article:

THE MILLAR’S TALE

The cab takes me over the Sydney Harbour Bridge towards the northern suburbs, giving me a last glimpse of the Opera House before the development on the far shore swallows us. Tourists rarely venture over this side, except to visit the zoo or to surf at Manly. It’s terra incognita for city cabs, too, it seems - the driver quickly get lost searching for the bungalow I have travelled halfway round the world to visit. When we eventually find it, on a quiet leafy road in East Lindfield, I stand on the grass verge opposite, wishing I smoked so I could calm my nerves. You see, I have appropriated the life of the woman in the house opposite, playing fast and loose with her dearest memories. I have even suggested her daughter might not have the strictest of morals when drunk.
The woman in the bungalow is called Beth Cort, she is in her eighties and, not thinking that I would ever meet her, I have used the story of her first husband for a novel. It’s something I have done several times, basing fiction on a kernel of fact. It’s never quite come home to roost like this before. A couple of teenagers cycle by and throw me worried glances. This is not a neighbourhood where they like strangers staring moodily at their houses. I toss my imaginary butt on the floor and cross the road to face the music.

*

This odyssey to Oz had its origins two years previously. I had written three WW2 books, all loosely based on aspects of the Special Operations Executive, the clandestine sabotage and subversion force, and I owed my publisher a fourth. I felt burned out, though, on France and the resistance. I thought that I, and many others, had told that story once too often. However, Italy seemed to me a fertile choice. Hardly explored in fiction, it suffered a spectacularly messy, and incompetent, campaign by the allies and plenty of vicious fighting between Italian partisans and those, like the notorious Brigate Nere (Black Brigades), loyal to Mussolini. Just the kind of hellish cauldron to parachute a hero or heroine into.
So, one night I Googled around, looking for potential subject matter, a true event that I could pick up and run with. The usual suspects appeared - Anzio, Monte Cassino, the liberation of Rome - but I wanted something that was more obscure and personal, a small, intimate story rather than a great sweep of history. Then up popped a genealogy site for the Millar family, posted by a Canadian intent on tracing his ancestors, with no apparent reference to Italy or partisans or SOE. Buried within it was a submission from a woman called Anne Storm, an Australian, about her father Bob Millar, a navigator/bomb-aimer, whom she never knew. All she had as a memoir was a letter, written to her from Foggia, Italy, in 1944, when he was seconded to the RAF, but flying for a South African squadron. It went like this:




1/2/44 F/O T.R.MILLAR RAAF Aus 422612 - 104 Squadron RAF CMF Italy

My Dear Daughter,
This is the first time I have written to you and although you are as yet too young to read it perhaps mother will save it up until the time comes when you can read it yourself. In 2 days time it will be your first birthday anniversary-a great event for your parents. My regret is that I cannot personally be there to help you blow out your single candle but believe me lassie I will be there in spirit.

I am writing this from a place called Italy which is far away from our fair land-a place where I would not be by choice so far away separated from a wife and daughter so dear to me. But I am here, precious one, because there is a war on caused by certain people who wished to rule the world harshly & despotically, imperilling an intangible thing called democracy which your mother and I thought all decent people should fight for. You will understand as you grow up what democracy means for us and how it is an ideal way of life which we aspire to put into practice.


All I ask of you, Anne dear is that you stay as sweet as your mother and cling tight to the subtle thing we call Christianity, which has been the core of her way of life & her mother's and mine. I hope that you will love and respect me as I love & respect my father.

That's all young lady. Have a happy birthday -may they all be happy birthdays. I hope to be home again one fine day. In the meantime lots of love to you and to mother

From Dad
Bob Millar

I printed it off, showed it to my wife and got the reaction I anticipated - a catch in the throat and a tear in the eye. I knew I could build a novel around that letter. So I e-mailed Anne Storm and offered to fly to Sydney to convince of my good intentions. The reply came back that I could fly to Sydney if I wished, but that she married an Englishman and that she had moved to Ramsbury, Wiltshire many years ago. On the grounds she had just saved me close to a thousand pounds, I offered a slap-up lunch at a restaurant of her choice in exchange a chance to lay out my stall.
The ‘young lady’ of the letter was by now a woman of sixty-one, married to Roy, with children of her own. Over the lunch, the story of the letter became even more poignant. Bob Millar only saw his daughter for a one week while on leave before he shipped out for training in Canada. Once in Europe, he was involved in raids on the Romanian oil fields, mining the Danube and, most dangerous of all, the long slog over the Carpathians from Italy to shadow the Vistula river, before coming into Warsaw at rooftop height, dropping supplies to the beleaguered Polish Army, grimly battling the Germans while the Russians looked on and did nothing to help. Aircrew losses were horrendous.
However, Bob Millar’s plane went missing not on one of these dangerous long-range sorties, but on what should have been a milk-run: parachuting supply canisters to Italian partisans.
‘On October 12 1944 in the late afternoon, twenty Liberators, sixteen of 31 Squadron of the South African Air Force and four of 34 Squadron SAAF took off from Foggia,’ Anne Storm told me, the facts fixed firmly in her mind. ‘Many of the pilots were RAF Flight Sergeants, because some of the SAAF officers were due to attend a party at 34 SAAF. Their mission was to drop supplies to the partisans operating in the Apennine and Maritime mountains of northern Italy. There were four different drop sites with five planes allotted to each site. My father was aboard the Liberator piloted by Major Urry, SAAF. The crew was composed of five SAAF, two RAF and, my father, who technically was with the RAAF. The plane had flown a mission to Yugoslavia the previous night.
‘The weather turned nasty in the mountains, their electronic aids became useless and many were forced to abandon their mission. However, six planes never made it back. Four went down on the peaks. One plane missed crossing to safety by just twenty feet, although the engines were catapulted across into France by the impact.’
Of the six that blundered into the mountains, five wrecks have been located. Bob Millar’s Liberator, KH-158, though, is still missing.
‘I always kept the letter because, apart from a few photographs, it was all I had of him. I was three week’s old when he left. But I became interested in finding him when, in early January 2001 my mother rang from Sydney to say he had seen an article in the Sydney Morning Herald asking for relatives of Liberator crew of 31 SAAF to contact the writer, Marie de Lisle, in Brisbane. Marie's father, it turned out, had been killed on the same mission as my father. Marie told me there was to be a commemoration service in Bra, northern Italy, to remember the sacrifice these men had made while trying to drop much needed supplies to the Italian partisans. Perhaps, I thought, they might know of an unidentified wreck.’
So, with the help of friends and researchers here and in Italy, began four years of tracking down acquaintances and relatives of the eight men on her father’s plane and those on some of the other Liberators. Although that has been far more successful than she ever imagined, KH-158 remains on the missing list; there was no ‘unidentified wreck’.
At the end of the lunch I told her I would write the book but, if she really objected to the finished product, I would shelve it and find another story to set in Italy. Conscious I might be wasting my time, I wrote the first draft in under four months and sent it off to her. If I wasn’t pacing the floor, I was tossing and turning in bed in anxiety. I had transformed her character into a 21-year old (it opens in 1965), who is mouthy, sexy and a dab hand with grenades. She was bound to find one of those objectionable. After an agonising wait of a few weeks, she gave her assent (the only quibble was an almost-sex scene, which ranked at about 1.5 on the Jackie Collins scale; the earth moved for neither participant). Then she dropped her bombshell: ‘I suppose we should ask my mother about all this.’
Her mother. Of course. I could hardly write about Bob Millar, even if I changed the family name change, as intended, without the permission of his widow, long since remarried. Her objections could scupper the whole project, because it would be difficult to proceed, knowing Bob Millar’s wife felt it was inappropriate or exploitative. Which brought me to the grass verge opposite that bungalow in East Lindfield.

*

The door is opened by the genial, portly figure of Bill Cort, Anne’s stepfather, who welcomes me in and ushers me though to the dining room, where home-made cakes and biscuits are laid out. I take this as either a good sign or a softening up before the metaphorical coshes come out. Either way, I can see where Bill gets his girth.
Beth Cort herself emerges from the kitchen, open, friendly and not at all hostile. Anne has told her what I have done and she has read a manuscript of the book, now christened After Midnight, that Anne has sent her. As she talks about Bob Millar her lower lip quivers and Bill decides he’ll go and make the tea.
‘Bob was my childhood sweetheart,’ she says in a low voice, sensitive to Bill’s feelings. ‘And I miss him every day. Bill has been wonderful, and very understanding, but it’s the truth. It’s not helped by just not being sure what happened or where he is. The Americans call it ‘closure’, don’t they? You keep reading about these planes being found from the war. Perhaps your book will jog someone’s memory. I would just would like to know where he is. If After Midnight helps, then that’s wonderful.’
And that’s it. I realise I have her blessing and, when Bill returns with the tea, we relax and talk about Anne as a child, their grandchildren, Australian politics and cricket. Only at the end of my time, a whole lemon cake later, do we return to the lost plane.
It transpires that there is one grim possibility that haunts Anne and Beth: that Bob’s Liberator made it over the coast but, perhaps fatally damaged by flak, was forced to ditch in the sea. ‘In which case we might never locate it,’ says Beth. ‘But you never know. That’s what life has taught me. You just never know what is going to happen.’