Jeff Ellis

Oh, yes! Very cleverly done. After all the hi-level goings on being revealed in the UK... anything seems possible.

Well done Nigel, a nice one!

I like slightly less cheek. That said, Nigel has crafted a delight for us... well done that man. I too enjoyed the detail and can apprfeciate the effort it takes. Thanks Nigel, it was a great read. Short stories like this one are rare jewels.

Totally delightful. Thank you Gee, for making me laugh.

A startlingly unusual story... I was completely unsure where it was going until the very end, and then it was suddenly completely consistent. A marvellous piece of work. Read it here... http://awesomedude.com/nigel_gordon/warlord/warlord.htm

A beautiful and unusual story. Is it too late to edit Pecman's comment to remove the spoiler?

A magnificent achievement... Well Done! But... The Boy Scouts of America would have thrown them out. Doesn't that tell us something?

My four main stories had different approaches. Bogs/Gray was pantsed as Bogs which was then drastically revised as Gray, having changed from the planned teen romp to a romance in chapter six of bogs, the mismatch of styles between the first and second halves of Bogs jarred. Wandervogel had a known start (discovering his fathers memorabilia) and a known end (Hitler and the escape from Berlin). How to get to Berlin was pantsed, how to escape was researched. Virtually all the story in between was spontaneous. The Moor was entirely unplanned. There was one segment of a thousand words that had a known place before I started and everything else fitted round it. Down There required that history happened in the correct order so I wrote an extended essay on European history from 1930 to 2000 and then wrote more or less linearly, adapting the history to blend into the story as I went. I actually had a problem in that I had two endings. The solution came by taking one of the endings and using it as the start... those who read it will know what I mean. So, in my case at least, I don't have a writing strategy, it has depended on the story

I don't think that "fit" to describe a woman is equivalent to "hung" in describing a man. In UK usage a closer match would I think be "stud", in that fit means a woman that you can readily envisage as sexually active or sexually desirable. As someone said it has nothing to do with physical fitness. The expression is often used as "well fit" a somewhat superlative state of sexual attractiveness, as in "Dr Who's companion is well fit!". Lucky Dr Who!

The expression I am familiar with to describe the doubling up that coped with the lack of housing during and after the war was "to be in rooms". Nigel's relatives would have described their situation as "After the war we were in rooms in Hull". I can remember being in rooms in Cardiff until I was five. We had an upstairs bedroom and the use of the kitchen and scullery (utility room). I believe that during the war under emergency regulations the system was enforceable, as was the placement of people (known as evacuees) evacuated from the cities. Sugar rationing lasted until about 1953. I remember that on a school trip that year a nice lady in Woolworths sold me a box of chocolates as a present for my mother, despite me having no "points" with me, because rationing was ending in a few days. "Points" because goods were marked with labels that showed a circle with a pie-cut missing (the point) and a number to show how many points it required. Each person had a ration-book in which the points were cancelled as they were used. There were many draconian regulations. Farmers could lose their farms if deemed to be failing to use best-practise as perceived by Min of Ag inspectors.

Unfortunately children suffer from being assembled by untrained, unskilled and unpaid workers on the night-shift

This one too... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_fQrcEfXRU#t=860 There is a moment when he makes a little thank you speech and suddenly the mature musician melts away, and... he really is a little boy. We must be grateful that his teachers and parents did tell him he was tto young

I agree with Cole, It's very well crafted... maybe fantasy maybe alternative reality... either way it is an excellent read.

Well, its race is run. Many thanks to those of you who stuck with it to thend, and especial thanks to those who have made comment. Apart from the excuse to devote (divert?) fourteen months to a few periods of history that I personally found interesting and under-reported, and of course the Fallschirmjaeger who history has largely forgotten perhaps because they had rather odd helmets and lacked the cache of a Hugo Boss designed uniform. But, more to the point I wanted to explore how youngsters could respond to evil surroundings. That and the notion of ships that pass in the night. We have all said "Oh really? I was there that night too!" Like six degrees of separation, Carlo, Hans and Gott are closer than we think... we are all closer to Hitler and Stalin than we think. Evil is there and always has been, it's how a morally sound boy responds to the challenge that matters. So, thanks again guys, you make the effort worth it.

If you think that we are all here because of the existence of an all-wise Creator, or if you profoundly don't, then read Nigel's interview. It has a sense of the ridiculous that Douglas Adams would appreciate. Come to think of it Douglas Adams knows whether there was a Creator... actually if there wasn't then he doesn't. So, don't skip the short stories, there are some jewels out there and this, delightfully, is one. Read it here http://awesomedude.com/nigel_gordon/an-interview-with-the-creator/an-interview-with-the-creator.htm

A great and enjoyable read. Curtis exemplifies the babies that went out with the bath-water. That men like Savile were evil is obvious and self-evident... but perhaps their other crime was to make it virtually impossible for men of good heart to follow their instinct to nurture the next generation. Incidentally, I liked the father's name... I can remember as a student standing outside the closed gates of the Russian embassy chanting "Dubcek-Svoboda!"

Things were only slightly better in WW2. Another famous WW2 disaster was the sinking of HMS Hood. She blew up when a shell reached a magazine, and sank in a matter of minutes. There were only three survivors... one in fact was indeed a midshipman. There is a website that lists the lost by rank, and its sobering to click on the ranks with "Boy" prefixes. Of the "Boy Buglers" one was 17 and the other only 16 http://www.hmshood.org.uk/crew/database/roh.php It is a long and honorable tradition for boys to join ships when incredibly young. I shall get the next bit wrong in detail and someone will correct me, I'm sure, but we all know the poem of "the boy stood on the burning deck whence all but he had fled". Well the boy was a French midshipman between 10 and 12, the ship was on fire and about to blow up when the fire reached the powder magazine. He refused to leave the side of his mortally wounded commanding officer on the French flagship at Aboukhir. The commanding officer was his father. Just imagine it... I can't.

He really was incredible, and so self-possessed... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIVqFjLH8Ok and they come in pairs too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CG9zflkTEY

Many thanks for the link to Definitions... Isn't that the nice thing about Awesomedude, we spend so much time saying thank-you?... anyway, thank you. That was indeed how it was sixty years ago. There were no gay men in our village of about a thousand. There were no gay boys in our school of about a thousand boys. Not, that is until I was fifteen and someone discovered that homosexuality existed. Then those that had been sharing fun in the bogs and under the desk... oh yes, and on the cross country course in summer, God bless the person who thought of running on the moors and in the woods in the lightest of clothing. Where was I? ah yes, we had discovered that what we did was illegal, then we discovered about chemical castration... and we were scared. Personally I was certain that I would grow out of it when I was sixteen. Curiously there was no homophobia... and I'm told by an even older old-boy that that was also true of the school ten years earlier. But, there you are, the illogic of it was we were scared that we might really be homo while in a school that exhibited not the slightest homophobia in a mining valley where homosexuality didn't exist because there were no homosexuals. But, times were changing, TV was arriving in our homes and one of the largest personalities would be Danny LaRue a female impersonator. Yes times were changing and Definitions brought it back to me, thanks Des.

Cole, yes, not just cardboard tanks but wooden aeroplanes too and also men... thousands of men and radio traffic. There was a complete army opposite Calais and Hitler was quite convinced that Normandy was just a feint. To make it really convincing they even placed a real famous general in charge ... as I recall a really p'd off Patton sat out Normandy so that the dummy army in Kent could be seen to have a plausible leader... maybe he had upset someone :-)

a tour de force, wonderful, delightful... so there. More I cry more! In this part of the country we have one of the largest misdirection tricks by a professional magician. In WW2 the great stage magician Maskelyne worked with movie set builders to create a derelict airfield. The most secret in the country it was where spies were flown out from to be dropped into occupied Europe. As far as I am aware the trick was totally successful and the runways were never bombed,

A really worthwhile 45 mins. It was particularly interesting because its a stage of life that I never went through (and not just because of the six hours of homework). Sixty years ago we just did what we did... it was fun and it was naughty... but it wasn't gay. I can clearly remember at 15 a few of us found time for girlfriends, open sex between us disappeared... and we found out about homosexuality! That was a shock, to discover that it was something you could be lumbered with for life... that is was illegal, not just naughty but something men got locked up for. So like I say, we never went through "coming out", we went from naughty boys to the closet all in one summer. Thanks for this, it was an interesting view of how it could have been... but wasn't

sorry to be dim Nick, put it down to age... by Gimp player, were you referring to Gom Player?

Yes, absolutely excellent and well worth reading. The setting in a prison and probation hostel was both new to me and enlightening. I like Nigel's unadorned style... it suited the subject. Do give it a go.

Thank you Nigel... the circumstantial detail; selection, facilities, rooms, rules etc come from the letters home from a Napola student to his parents. I liked finding incidental detail like the lack of bedside lamps and that the school provided pocket-money, presumably to ensure uniformity across the students. I hope the story will live up to your kind expectation