In an interview on Books for Children

What about your last book, The Red Badge of Courage?

It’s the story of a very young soldier, about 14 or 15 years old, in the American Civil War, and it’s about him fearing that he’s a coward. He runs away and finds himself and finds the courage to come back and take his place alongside his fellow soldiers. I think in the heart of almost every man and woman there is this fear that if you were put in that position where you had to show courage, your courage might fail you. Increasingly as I get older I know that to be the case. It’s a book that encourages you to believe that you can do it. It’s not about the violence of war but about how people manage to get through it.

You often choose to write about war as well.

Yes. I’ve just finished a book called The Kites are Flying, which I think is life affirming in the same way as my last book choice. It’s a book about a wall. And it’s very interesting because people are talking a lot at the moment about the Berlin Wall coming down. The people who pulled it down were children in the sense that they had been children and saw this wall around them as they were growing up. And when they got older they decided to pull it down.

My story is about a reporter who goes to Palestine to find out about the wall that the Israelis have put up to protect themselves from the Palestinians. The Israelis naturally see it as some form of protection while the Palestinians resent it. There are two children in the book living on either side of the wall. One starts sending messages across the wall with a kite and eventually his faith is rewarded because the Israeli children get together and send all the kites back with their messages of goodwill. The book is all about the hope and the promise that in the end the children will put it right – which will happen.

It’s seems inconceivable at the moment, but that is what happened with East and West Germany. So it’s a book about peace and a book about hope. We are in the middle of a conflict which is touching the world in such a disastrous way in that people take sides, and the whole point of this book is to show that if you stop taking sides you can work it out.

In an interview on War

The Red Badge of Courage is a novel about the American Civil War, I think?

I chose these next three examples about the actual experience of war. This is a novel about a young soldier volunteering in the American Civil War who has no experience of war at all, has no idea whether he is going to be brave or whether he is going to be cowardly. The way in which he suddenly finds himself caught up in a battle is absolutely brilliant in its description of the battle itself and the emotions he feels, the way he reacts, the impression made on him by fear, horror, dread, exhilaration, triumph, exhaustion, hunger sweeping over him in great waves. He stumbles through these battles and emerges at the end saying, that was what it was like and I have survived. Even if one has no interest in war at all and dislikes the whole idea, it is a great novel. It is very short, incredibly vivid and I would put it on my list of the best 12 books that everybody ought to read.

Does he lose his idealism in the process?

He starts not as a grand idealist. War is like an examination. You are discovering the kind of person that you are. I had my own examination. Like the hero of this novel, I started not knowing what to expect, not knowing how I was going to behave. Was I going to be cowardly? Was I going to be heroic? Was I going to be ingenious? How was I going to stand up to it all? At the end of it I had been through a number of experiences which did show me the kind of person that I was. By the end of the war I was grown up. One of the few things that war does help one to do is to get to know oneself in depth. There are some things one discovers about oneself which are lamentable and others which are rather surprising.

Do you think of young men today, who haven’t fought in any wars, as being rather callow by comparison?

Well, they’ve been through different kinds of experiences which have matured them, but war is a maturing process and there is nothing quite like it in the world. People are trying to kill you and you discover yourself in a situation in which people really are trying to get you. It is very interesting and scary. There is nothing quite like it in civil life. Fear is a great examiner of one’s character.

The thing that I find talking to people who have fought, is that they start off very clear about what they’re fighting for, but after all the horror of it, it becomes much less straightforward.

Yes. Yes. Indeed. Much less. It’s a very complicated business and the personal experience is a very interesting test.

It’s interesting that it comes back to the personal experience, because it often starts out as a rather grandiose mission for one’s country.

It really comes down, irrespective of who the enemy is and what the cause is, to some people over there who are trying to kill you and it is your job to try to kill them. It becomes very basic to that extent. I certainly didn’t go to war in a state of high idealism. I found myself in an intensely disagreeable situation in which the war seemed to be a necessity and my taking part in it at that particular age was also a necessity. I’d have been faintly relieved if I had not had to do it but, as it was, it was a job that had to be done. I think an earlier generation that went into the First World War had greater expectations and higher ideals of the kind that I certainly didn’t have, if only because the First World War had knocked that out of people.