The following pages do not make easy reading, and although I have done no more than edit them, I would not willingly return to them. And when at last you come to the end of them, I think you too may have no wish to set eyes on them again. For all that, I have published them in an attempt to set the record straight and to allow my grandfather an opportunity to speak out of the grave, to set the events of seventy years ago before the eyes of a younger generation. Looking again at what I have just written, I fancy I have mixed my metaphors. It is not a strong stomach you will need, but rather, strong nerves. There is little of the gory in what follows. No blood to speak of, nothing grisly, nothing blood-curdling. Yet, I urge you not to read the diaries by a dim light in darkness, or in those unsettled hours when the sun sets or the white moon rises over the moving sea, or when there is music in bewildered places, when you are alone and the cat scratches at the door. What you have in front of you are wartime diaries kept by my late grandfather Dominic Lancaster, who died at the age of ninety-two in a long white bed at the Eden Valley Hospice just outside Carlisle.
