‘Hinky-Dinky Parlay-Voo’ is a free to read short story about the call-up, the media frenzy, and the popular songs of the day – and about the dark reality that lay beyond in the mud of Flanders.
‘Tree of Knowledge‘ is about the Eastern front – in Mesopotamia, or modern day Iraq.
These stories are included in my free eBook ‘In Other Times’, an anthology of 20 historical fiction short stories.
To download your copy and the free monthly newsletter ‘The HistWriter’, subscribe here:
I also highly recommend Susan Lanigan’s war novels, available via Amazon:
I was on holiday in the Ardennes, where it rained every day and our campsite turned to soft mud that the driving rain spattered a foot high up every surface. Thinking every day that the end of the month deadline for the story was drawing near, and here I was in this muddy place not doing any writing. On the way back to Calais, a town now bound in everyone’s minds with the refugee crisis and the grievous human costs of war, we had arranged an overnight stop near St-Omer. We passed Armentières; the name stuck in my mind. We passed Hazebrouck, where one can glimpse the graves from the bypass. On the Michelin map one can trace the Western Front in a scatter of crosses that mark the WW1 cemeteries. The story came into my mind in a jumble of fragments and dialogue, typed into my iPad at odd moments. I had an idea that the jingoism of that period would fit with the ‘Hype’ theme.
When I got home to my desk I googled ‘Armentières’ and the song ‘Hinky-Dinky, Parlay-Voo’, one form of which begins ‘Mademoiselle from Armentières’, struck me as one of the most irritating tunes ever written. And there we have it.
