Charlie Echo (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781800462267)

Like Aladdin, but with post-traumatic stress, Charlie Echo is a story about wishes - the last wishes of a dying soldier in Normandy in 1944. Verbal wills of this sort are valid if there are two witnesses and the first men on the scene are radio operator Charlie Goodman and his assistant, Sid Saunders. Unfortunately, in the confusion of events that follow, Charlie fails to ascertain the full identity of the dying officer and is invalided back to Blighty plagued by trauma and remorse. Once he has been demobbed also, it falls to Saunders to break the impasse by getting his comrade to repair a radio telephone, just like the one they were using in France. What he doesn't anticipate is that working on the set will prompt Charlie to not only hear the mystery soldier's voice again, but to see him too. If not quite the genie in the lamp, it seems like there's a ghost in the machine and one that's been transported to his workshop in Leeds.

Dismayed to discover that his wishes have not been carried out, the ghost goads Charlie into journeying through post-war Britain in order to fulfil his battlefield promise. Jolting between humour and pathos, it's a journey that transforms reclusive repair man into unlikely pantomime hero and propels Saunders off in pursuit to play his allotted role in the "show".

"For a number of years, I worked for the Film and Video Archive of the Imperial War Museum at Duxford, near Cambridge," explains Andrew, who lives in Alveley. "For the most part the job revolved around film preservation. However, sitting alone watching reel after reel of mostly black and white silent footage, one couldn't help wondering what the people captured in those moving pictures were talking about at that particular moment, and then, inevitably, what they might say if they could speak to us in there here and now. Living as I was in Cambridge, I was also fortunate to be able to catch a number of the pantomimes performed by the University's comedy group "The Footlights". Sitting in the ADC theatre, I was struck by the way the distance between the old, music hall style of comedy that had thrived for so much of the twentieth century, and its more modern variation, not only shrank but was bridged. Past and Present could speak to each other again and, as they did so, the idea of a wartime story that incorporated comedy elements began to take root and eventually became Charlie Echo."