Many A Shadow

There are seven billion people on this planet and each of them have a different story to share. This is just one person’s tale.

William Turner was a country lad, born in a small farm cottage in Oxfordshire at the end of the First World War. Growing up in this rural idyll, William thrived, attending school and becoming an apprentice carpenter. Before long, William was called into the army, where he was part of the Normandy invasion and the subsequent bitter fighting throughout France.

Detailing his life before, during and after the war, Many A Shadow follows William from his humble beginnings ­– playing pranks with his friends at his village school – through to the sleepless nights he spent pondering the horrors he had witnessed in Normandy.

Aged just 26 when he returned home, William had already lived two lives – one of a simple country boy; another in the army on active service ­– but now he was to embark on a new life as a husband, to a wife he had never spent longer than three months with, and a father to two children, one of whom he had never seen before.

As the book concludes, William considers the bestiality of war and how it has changed him, wondering if there are perhaps no winners in life; only survivors. Many A Shadow is the story of just one man, but William’s tale is not dissimilar from the hundreds of others like him who were uprooted from their homes and forced to fight for their country.

Following a career that included journalism and PR consultancy, David Barter is now retired. He is the chairman of the Association of English-speaking residents in Mallorca, where he currently resides. David also commits a great deal of his time to running a charity to support orphans and poor children in Peru – a country that he visits frequently. Many A Shadow is his first book.