By Harry Mottram: Whether it was her time at Kings of Wessex, her stories in the Cheddar Valley Gazette or her successful campaign to save Cheddar Library from closure, many people in Axbridge will know Sue Purkiss as a friend and a writer. As a long standing member of the Axbridge Four Seasons Book Club founded back in the 1990s she’s also well known for her published novels.
Her latest book is as she puts it ‘is for adults’ – since previously her writings have been for children and young adults. An Ordinary War has just been published and was inspired by the experiences of her father who was captured by the German forces at Dunkirk in 1940 during the famous evacuation and defeat.
She writes: “This book is very special to me. It’s a novel, rising out of my father’s experience as a prisoner of war – he was captured in May 1940 on the way to Dunkirk.
“Like many former soldiers and victims of war, he didn’t talk very much about what had happened to him: when he did start to open up, it was mostly to share funny incidents and stories – like the one about a German guard who had formerly been a violinist in the Berlin Philharmonic, and used to stand under a tree playing an imaginary violin – so lost in his memories that when a senior officer came by, the POWs used to hand him his gun and tell him to smarten up.
“Of course, it wasn’t all like that. After he died, I decided to find out more about what had happened to him – to join the dots, as it were. You can read more about that process here. https://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2026/01/an-ordinary-war-by-sue-purkiss.html Of course, there was an enormous amount I didn’t discover.
“But there was enough to form a sort of a scaffold, and on that I built this story. It’s about a young man called Harry Pilgrim, who, like Dad, is captured on the way to Dunkirk. After a long and difficult March east, culminating in one of those dreadful train journeys, he faces the prospect of incarceration in a camp in Poland. He experiences deep friendships, but also betrayal: he falls in love with Zofi, but loses her in devastating circumstances. When he gets home, he does his best to forget all this. But many years later, as Poland emerges from the Soviet yoke, he receives a letter with a Polish postmark…”
Most people will have heard of Dunkirk in relationship to World War Two but may not appreciate the wider story. Apart from the evacuation back to England by the navy and civilian craft of the majority of the British forces sent to France to stop the Nazis the defeat has come to symbolise the so-called Dunkirk spirit. In essence when things are tough, we pull together. Around a third of a million troops were spirited across the English Channel to fight another day but about 41,000 were captured – to spend the rest of the war as prisoners. And one of those was Sue’s dad.
Sue will be speaking at the Axe Vale Arts Centre about the novel and her research into her dad’s story on Saturday 14th November, in the latest edition of Books, Bakes and Banter between 10.30am and 12noon. For more on the novel and Sue’s writing see https://suepurkisswriter.com/ and to buy a copy online visit https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/author/B0034OUYA0
Axe Vale Arts Centre, West Street, Axbridge. https://axevalearts.org.uk
For more on the defeat at Dunkirk visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Dunkirk#Evacuation
The main image is from the website 2/4th Machine Gun Battalion – see https://2nd4thmgb.com.au/story/life-of-a-pow-european-theatre-ww2-dunkirk-1940/ it shows allied POWs at Dunkirk being marched into German custody.
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