Guest Blog: Tom Stuchfield On SOMEWHERE A GUNNER FIRES

And the Horse You Rode in on

My father and I never really spoke about family. Not in a bad way, nothing tragic, just - there was a lack of family to talk about. I knew plenty of RAF kids who could trace their family from their school gates, through Colditz and into Rorke's Drift, but for me - vagueness and anecdotes from the early Seventies, at best.

I had sketched a few ideas about a story when I was about 15. I'd been on a battlefield tour of Belgium, and it was yet another opportunity to learn lots about other people's ancestors.

The characters - some German, some British - were pure fiction, barely more than stereotypes for a war movie I would never write. I suppose I harboured some anger at the whole World War One debacle, but at that age, I wasn't going to do much with it.

The Cavalry Behind You

I'm 18, and I'm auditioning for my first play at university.

Tiny extract, Northern accent - could have been my dating profile. It was right up my alley. It was in a tiny theatre, but it sold out, and during a Q&A with the writer, I remember looking at the audience, who five minutes ago had been rapt by our performances, now hanging onto the playwright's every word.

I wanted that. I wanted to have a story to tell, rather than strutting and fretting about someone else's. Pure arrogance, I'm sure. I dusted off Private Volker, young Spencer, Captain Dixon, and reread my sketches from three years earlier. Suffice it to say...it was no War Horse.

Along with some friends of mine - two of whom are still with the project, five years on - I rewrote, reimagined and returned to my old juvenile characters, and - somehow - had the play on stage within the year.

We adapted, we altered, we ran at the Fringe, we moved to London, and ran it twice more - every time tweaking, changing, and improving.

Somewhere a Gunner Fires

London opened this Midlander's eyes to museums, libraries and bookstores beyond anything else I had experienced. For over a year, I read everything I could find on World War One.

The show started to morph from the format we had used at university - stopped being fiction, and started to embody truth.

Epitaphs from war graves, letters sent from sons to mothers, anecdotes from obscure battles - all started to permeate the next incarnation of the play.

By the end of 2017, I knew exactly who my father's family were - and had found notebooks in an attic that I could understand with ease. I recognised battles and place names: Paris, Passchendaele, Venice, the Alps...

I kept digging, and reading, and researching.

The play that had started life as a one-hour melodrama in a bunker, that had become a three-hour epic, was now becoming the true story of my great-grandfather, and the characters in his war diaries.

1918

This February, myself and my team will stand on stage in Islington and tell the story of six real people. Six people whose lives were forever altered by the First World War, and, more specifically, the actions of my great-grandfather, in Italy, in 1918.

We will stand and tell the true story of Spencer, Volker, Captain Dixon - those once fictional figures, who I didn't know were real.

It will be almost 100 years to the day since their stories came to their heartbreaking end.

Somewhere A Gunner Fires is at King's Head Theatre 6-24 February

Watch a trailer below!

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