When I was a small child, we used to visit my maternal grandmother and her sister, a great Aunt who lived in another town. They had come from a large family, and used to talk about it to me sometimes. There were eight sisters altogether , including one named Elizabeth, who came to a terrible end, burned to death one morning when her nightdress caught fire as she lit the range early one morning. That story became engraved upon my memory. It still is.

But there was another one too, which had almost as great an impact. The eight sisters had just one brother, cherished and idolised by them all, of course. When he was eighteen, he went to war-the Great War as they called it, the 1914-1918 war.On his nineteenth birthday, he was killed, like so many thousands of other young men, at the Battle of the Somme. I didn’t think the family was ever the same again, nor so many families like it. He was a young man from a whole generation which was, quite simply, wiped out.

They had a photograph of him in his uniform, and I used to take it down and look at it. He had such a young face, even I could see that, as a child, he was not much more than a child himself. His ears stuck out, I remember, and his hair was cut very, very short under his cap. His Christian name was Sidney, and the family surname was Owen. It is a coincidence, of course, but the long arm of that, as they say is a long one and I am believer in these small signs and symbols, as important parts of ones life.

He was an Owen, and so was Wilfred(no relation), the greatest of that rich generation of poets who flowered such quick maturity in the Great War. Later, I discovered another young soldier whose name was Owen, Owen Wingrave, hero of a Henry James short story, about whom Benjamin Britten wrote one of his operas. The magic circle joins hands, at that point, for it was Britten, the man whose work has had more influence upon mine than anyone else’s (including other writers), who first brought me back to my memories of Great Uncle Sidney Owen.

In 1962 I went to a performance of Britten’s War Requiem. I didn’t know in advance much about what it was going to be like, or about, I only knew that music of his I had already heard I had responded to at once, and that it had remained with me, in my mind and my heart, had fired my imagination. But I was not at all prepared for the effect that performance War Requiem was to have on me. I came out feeling dazed, as though something very important had happened – to me, I mean as well as in musical terms – I cant exactly explain it or even describe it. But one result was that I became filled with the desire to write something myself about the First World War. But not yet, not yet, I wasn’t anywhere near ready.

For the next eight years, I did a lot of things, but all the time, on and off, I read books about that war, and though about it a lot.Yet I kept suppressing the desire to write about it, whenever it surfaced.To tell the truth, I was scared of the idea. How could I do it? What did I know? I hadn’t been there, I only knew what I had read, and imagined.

But it wasn’t the ability to absorb facts and re-create the past that I doubted, it was not the possibility of that kind of routine, practical failure that frightened me. It was the knowledge that I would have to sink myself completely and utterly in imagination, in emotions, into the experience of that awful war. In writing about it, I realised that a big piece of my own self would somehow disappear, I should never be quite the same again. The facts were too horrible, of course; I did not think I wanted to find out more than I already knew about the carnage, the human waste, the folly and the cruelty, the devastating suffering.

But if we are to grow – and I am sure that is what we are meant to do, that is the point of our existence – we must change, we have to learn to do things, and also give things up, and those things include the cosiness of ignorance and the safety of uninvolvement and personal detachment.To understand the present – which is where eternity is – to see what is good and recognise evil in order to fight and overcome it, we have to know it, face it and accept it, and be hurt and personally changed, to by various aspects of the truth.

Besides I was over-dramatising, heaven knows, I was only going to go through the trenches imaginatively, and I would come out of them alive and well and sitting in my study! You couldn’t say that about all those young men.

In 1969 and 1970 I wrote in rapid succession, a novel called I’m the King of the Castle, a short novel, the Albatross, then several short stories and radio plays. I was, as it were, well run-in. I knew that now, if ever, was the time to tackle the novel about the First World War.

From the summer until Christmas, I read everything I could lay my hands on, in a rather unselective and haphazard way. I went to the London Library, where I found row upon row of memoirs, diaries, and letters by soldiers of the First World War, many of them privately printed by relatives, after the deaths of their young authors. I read volumes of Autobiography, like Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, and those of Siegfried Sasson and Guy Chapman. I read the poets, major and minor, I read long official histories and biographies of the Kaiser and General Haig, I read one novel only, Remarque’s All quiet on the Western Front. I read until I could read no more. And as I did so, various things crystallised, by themselves, in my mind. I decided I would write about the soldiers – as opposed to Sailors or Airmen – and in the trenches, not anywhere else. >For it was the trenches that were the real, black heart of war, between and in and around them so many died for so precious little ground. In them, the worst experiences were suffered, and the best of the Poetry written. Also, it was going to be easier to find out about Trench warfare and life, because it was really very limited and circumscribed.

After Christmas, 1970, I drove off to my rented fisherman’s cottage in Aldeburgh – Britten’s Aldeburgh; I had already worked there, happily and freely, in the two precious winters. It felt like home, to be beside that grey, North Sea, and shingle shore, for I ws born by the sea, a bit further up the same North-east coast, in Yorkshire.

Also, on the outskirts of the small town of Aldeburgh, there are marshes, crossed by dykes and they are flat, flat and wet under the wide sky. When it was cold, those marshes took on something of the aspect of the Fields of Flanders. Here and there, people had dumped old bicycle wheels and tin oil drums, and they had half-sunk into the mud, and rusty metal loomed out of the pools of the water, like the debris of a battlefield. When I took a break from writing, I walked on those marches, early and late. In the end, I began to hear the boom of guns in the boom of the sea, and the cries of wounded men in the cries of the seagulls, to see the blood, not the red of the early sunset, staining the water of the pools and ditches.

I had brought with me only a few out of the many books I had read; they were a comprehensive military history of the war, The Somme by Brigadier A.H. Farrar-Hockely, a small red hand book of the regulations issued to officers of the British Army in 1914, and the Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen.

I cannot say, now, where my story within the story – that of the friendship between the two young soldiers, Barton and Hilliard – came from, though one personal relationship I had observed bore some resemblance to certain aspects of it. >But all the details of their personalities and backgrounds, and the characters of the other soldiers, and the day-to-day details of what happened to them, all those came to me as I went along, each day, rising up in my mind ready-formed. This has always been my experience when writing fiction. It is no good enquiring too closely into the origins of it all, and I am slightly superstitious about doing so. I have learned, over the years, simply to trust the workings and productions of my subconscious and of my imagination.

I began the book in mid-January and finished it at the end of March. I didn’t do anything else much, apart from write it, and think about writing it, and then eat, sleep, walk – and have nightmares. I was not interrupted at all. There was no telephone in the cottage and that year there was a postal strike. I had one or two kind friends who gave me a social evening now and then and kept me from going a bit potty.

Many people have asked me, since it was published, whether it wasn’t a terribly difficult book to write. The answer is, no, and then, yes. No, in the practical sense. As I have said, the information about the war was abundantly available and the facts were easy to grasp, because they were rather repetitive. I had a military historian to check my details, when the book was finished, in case I had got details about things like guns, and arms discipline and so forth, wrong. To reconstruct the battlefields of war, and the life in the camps, and the hospitals, and conversations about it all, back in England, was really very straightforward.

But – was it difficult? Yes. It was, as I had expected and dreaded, a devastating subject to get involved in, a terrible world to enter, imaginatively, an appalling business to be with young soldiers, day and night, in the trenches and in battle, in danger and fear and dirt. I felt exhausted, tense, horrified, depressed and angry the entire time. At the end I felt drained. There was none of the usual burst of exhilaration and euphoria at completing a piece of work. I had done what I’d always known I would do, one day, and had laid some personal ghosts. That was all. Now, I am occasionally sent books about the Great War, to read, comment on, or review. When I wrote the last words of the novel, I wanted to do as Hilliard did – look ‘up and ahead’. I never once wanted to look back. I don’t think I ever will.