Prisoners of War, first published by Methuen in 1990, is not only a standalone novel, I think it’s also more autobiographical than any of Terrance’s other books. It’s set in the spring of 1944, with young Tony Dent — ie Terry Dicks — starting a new school at “Grendon Moor” in the north of England, where his dad, a sergeant, has been posted to the local prisoner-of-war camp.
Tony’s mum and dad, Bill and Nell, have the names of Terrance's parents, and also their temperaments and backgrounds. The following, for example, matches a description Terrance gave elsewhere about the real-life William Henry Dicks:
“Dad … was what you might call unpolitical. Back in London, he belonged to the Liberal Club, the Labour Club and the Conservative Club, all at the same time. He said the company was better at the Labour Club, the beer was better at the Liberal Club, and the Conservative Club had the best billiard table. Dad could get on with anyone, anywhere, any time.” (p. 56)
Bill is a bit of a wheeler-dealer, able — in the midst of rationing — to acquire champagne for a party, or bacon and eggs for his wife. When posh Lady Carrington screams at him because his army truck has upset the gravel on her drive, Bill easily charms her, and lies to her too, so as not to land her husband in trouble for not passing on “her orders” about where they should park (p. 24). He’s a loveable rogue, good in a crisis and, when needed, in a fight.
While there’s lots on the “happily incompatible” relationship of Bill and Nell, and Tony’s issues fitting in at a new school, the main story involves his burgeoning friendship with a German prisoner, about which both feel conflicted, and the machinations of a Nazi officer in the same camp. There’s also a romantic subplot for Tony — we’re told in the closing chapter that he goes on to marry Lucy Carrington.
Tony shares traits with young Terrance:
“What with being an only child, and our being shunted about so much, I was a keen picturegoer and what my family called a big reader.” (p. 48)
But Terrance turned 9 in April 1944 and though we’re not told Tony’s age, he’s surely older than this given what happens here and that he is taller than his dad (p. 100). There's some other fudging of real-life, in that the imposing headmaster Dr White is surely based on the real-life Dr Whiteley, headmaster of East Ham Grammar School for Boys, where Terrance was a pupil after the war. This is a fictional adventure story grounded in various odd bits of real life — and that’s what makes it so effective. The suspense and moral complexity feel real.
In fact, it’s not quite a standalone novel as it surely follows Terrance’s short story “London’s Burning”, first published in the anthology Streets Ahead — Tales of City Life, also published by Methuen and a year before this novel came out. (Around this time, Methuen published new editions of Terrance’s Baker Street Irregulars books, too).
Streets Ahead was edited by Valerie Bierman, who Terrance had known since 1980 when she invited him to be a guest at the Edinburgh Book Fair and later Edinburgh Book Festival. She says in the introduction that she approached 10 well-known novelists and asked them to write “a story on any theme that interested them — provided it had a city as a background” (p. 7); the results were almost all based on personal experience and connections to the cities they describe. So, the brief inspired something more personal than usual from Terrance. In fact, I think we get some of his best and most vivid writing:
“Most mornings we’d make ourselves late for school by hunting for shrapnel, chunks of ragged metal fragments, all that was left of the exploded bombs. Stamp collecting was nowhere that year.
I thought it was all wonderful. But my mum and dad didn’t and now I can see why.
One morning I woke up to find a gaping, smoking hole where the end house in the street used to be. A nice family called the Strettons, cheerful dad, pleasant mum and two little girls. They’d just moved into the house and done it up and they were pleased as anything with it. Now there was no more house and no more Strettons.” (“London’s Burning”, Streets Ahead, pp. 77-78)
Given the danger, the unnamed narrator is taken by his mother — Nelly (p. 78) — to stay with her cousin on a farm some 50 miles outside London. Homesick, he runs away and arrives back in London as the bombs are falling. It’s a thrilling, concisely told story, running just 11 and a half pages. At the end we're told that the narrator’s dad “finished up Quartermaster-Sergeant in an army camp in the North, and after a time Mum and I moved up to join him” (p. 85).
That matches Tony Dent’s experience in the novel:
“Mum had tried a sort of private-enterprise evacuation on me when the bombing first started, packing me off to relations in the country. I’d hated it so much I’d run away after a couple of weeks.” (Prisoners of War, p. 22.)
They’re surely the same character, but how much of this was based on Terrance's own real experience?
Sadly, Prisoners of War doesn’t seem to have made much of an impact. I’ve found little in the way of press coverage about it, and Terrance didn’t write another book for Methuen after this, though he did contribute a short story to another Bierman anthology, No More School? (1992).
But I think this novel may have influenced something else. It was published in June 1990, and that same month Terrance received a letter from Peter Darvill-Evans, editor at Virgin Publishing, to confirm a new range of original Doctor Who novels. Terrance was invited to come up with a story involving a villain created for the range, the Timewyrm, but was otherwise free as to plot and setting. His synopsis, delivered in August, began with a compelling image:
“The Doctor in erratic pursuit of the Timewyrm finds himself attending the 1950 [sic] Festival of Britain. He realises when and where he is when they emerge from the TARDIS to the South Bank and see the Skylon, the tapering tower that is the symbol of the Festival. It’s there all right — but there’s a swastika on top!” (“Doctor Who: The New Adventures — Exodus of Evil by Terrance Dicks”, storyline received by Virgin Publishing, 23 August 1990).
Just as with Prisoners of War, this was an adventure story based on his own experience, grounding things in the real:
“I actually remembered going to the Festival of Britain with a school party in 1951, so it was fun to bring that in. I remember it rained all the time.” (Andrew Martin, “Terrance Dicks — Writing the Past, Present and Future”, TV Zone Special #5, p. 23.
That’s exactly what we see in what he wrote:
“Beside a broad and sluggish river, a group of concrete pavilions huddled under a fine drizzling rain. A tall slender tower soared gracefully into the mists towards a grey and cloudy sky.” (Terrance Dicks, Timewyrm: Exodus, 1991).
As in the synopsis, this London has fallen to the Nazis and the Doctor and Ace are soon arrested. The Doctor not only escapes but convinces the Nazis that he's a senior officer, commandeering a car and swanning about like he owns the place. It’s deftly both great fun and also tense and suspenseful.
When I first read Timewrym: Exodus in the summer of 1991, I knew this was also riffing on what the Second Doctor does in pretending to be a German office in TV story The War Games (1969) — co-written by Terrance and his friend Malcolm Hulke.
But now, reading Prisoners of War, I can see he was drawing on an older source. In this wheeler-dealer Doctor, there's something of Terrance’s dad.
- I’ll be giving a short talk on Terrance Dicks at the Target Book Club event on 19 July