Speaker 1: How are you doing today, David.
Speaker 2: I'm that hot from the weather, but I've got a
belt of hay fever, so I might sound very croaky
to you this morning.
Speaker 1: That's in radio.
Speaker 3: We would love that because that's what That's what listeners
love to hear, is that little croakiness.
Speaker 1: Man. But you know the thing.
Speaker 3: About it is is that you know you as a writer.
I mean you you understand how the mind, body, and
soul physically works. And you've got to reach us that
are reading the books.
Speaker 2: I think you have to. I think if you're creating
characters in your books, or or even if you're writing
about yourself, you have to try and put that emotion
into those characters and how you think they would feel
an act. It's very important.
Speaker 1: Being the creator of hard Read.
Speaker 3: What what did you envision while you first set out
on this project, because i mean this is your third
military novel.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm not sure, because I'm a new boy really
at writing. I'm not sure what I envisions. But it
was really trying to show people what a soldier or
a serviceman goes through when they're in a terrorist war,
in a security situation, trying to protect people from people
who want to take over their lives. So I thought
I'd get it down on paper, inspired by my late wife,
and that's really how the novels started, and slowly but surely.
The first one I thought was a bit of a disaster.
But as I worked my way through, I think I've
learned a lot of lessons in how to put over
my experiences in the services and other people's.
Speaker 3: You talk about how tough it was, I mean, I
mean hard Rein is set in the nineteen seventies in Ireland.
I was alive during those time periods. I remember the headlines.
It was not a real peaceful place over there.
Speaker 2: No, it was tragic really, but people called it the Troubles,
which to my mind is sounds like an unpleasant neighbor
parking his car in your parking lot. But it really
was a brutal terrorist war. I mean, could have family
members dragged out of the homes at night and have
a drill put through their kneecaps, or shot through the kneecaps,
or worse, dragged off to some remote woods and murdered.
Until this day, a lot of the bodies have never
been recovered.
Speaker 3: Wow, you have you share a quote here that really
is deep inside my heart. There's a heavy price to
pay for peace on all sides of a conflict. I
love that for some reason. I think it's because maybe
that opens up our hearts to say, look, it's all
going to come with a cost.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And you know, Winston Churchill said better jaw jaw than
war war, meaning it's better to talk than it is
to fight. But it comes a point with some people
who are not prepared to talk through problems and resolve them.
They just want to dominate with the bower of a gun.
And then you really have to stand up to them.
It's not just neighbor and neighbors standing up to them,
it's village and the village next to it standing up
to the town and the city and so on. And
you know, it's very, very difficult. Takes a lot of
courage for people to do that. And I think in
the book, I've tried to show suddenly what the local
people were going through and how the security forces tried
to deal with the situation. And they didn't always get
it right. No one ever does. But it's a difficult
thing to get a balancing act when you're dealing with
terrorists who work in the dark and murder. People in
the dark can plant bombs and don't care who they kill, women, children,
doesn't matter what religion they are or race. They just
go ahead and do that.
Speaker 3: The name of the book Hard Rain, from David Brown.
We'll be right back, Hey, thanks for coming back to
my conversation with author David Brown his book Hard Rain.
That's so interesting that you're bringing in the real people,
the civilians. And the reason why I bring that up
is because I've been with different punk bands such as
the Sex Pistols, who know that time period all too
well and they feel that that's where their inspiration to
try to get the word of music out there to people,
because because the times were very dark and they had
to learn how to how to basically deal with what
was going on around them.
Speaker 2: Indeed, and you know, there was a terrible tragedy the
group called the Irish show band We're traveling back from
doing performance in Northern nine and when they were taking
aside and on their trip back to Sudden and actually
murdered on the streets. And I don't believe the perpetrators
of that have all been court some have been brought
to justice. And the reason I think they did. That
was because they saw it as both sides of the
communities of Roman Catholics, the Protestants and the security forces
all getting together behind the love of music and what
it can do and bring peace to people. And I
think it was a revenge killing for that.
Speaker 3: What did you feel in your heart at the age
of fifteen when you joined the British Army. I mean
that's an early age there, David.
Speaker 2: Well, Yeah, in those days you could join at fifteen,
but you weren't allowed to be sent into any combat
until you were seventeen. I felt a great deal of relief.
To be honest, my hometown Cambridge, which famous for its universities,
I came from the opposite end to that where you
didn't get three meals a day. You've got one meal
a day and anything else you could find, basically, and
you were living in a sort of Victorian slum which
was cold even when the sun was shining. So joining
the army and getting nice uniforms to wear and three
cooked meals a day seeing a good deal.
Speaker 3: You make everything feel so real inside this book. And
I know that you've gone through so much in your
own British Army history. But the thing is is that
to put it on that page, to make it feel
so real, did you have to relive it again? And
how did you handle that emotionally?
Speaker 2: That's a good question, because I think you never stop
handling it. You just and you don't really come to
terms with it. You just learn to live with it.
And I think that when I was writing it, a
lot of the things that I had first hand knowledge of,
I was reliving it slightly, but I was trying to
put it into words in a way that readers would understand,
not my mixed up mind over it. So that took
quite a bit of work actually sort of sorting out
what was real and what my head was inventing at
the time.
Speaker 3: My wife really wants to know. She goes, she looked
at me, and she goes ask him the question of
in one way or another, has Queen Elizabeth II appeared
in your books?
Speaker 2: Well? Not yet, uh I did. I did meet actually
the most amazing lady and or was. Sadly we'll no
longer see her lights again, and she could make anybody
feel comfortable and at ease. But maybe maybe in the
book I'm writing at the moment, I will put something
in there.
Speaker 3: Where can people go to find out more about you, David,
because I want them to be able to experience all
of your writing and to grow with you as you
write that next book.
Speaker 2: Well, where do we get e anything this game? It's
good old Amazon. So Amazon have Hard Rain, and also
they now have The Darkness, which is the follow on
with the same central character to the Darkness, and it's
still in Northern Ireland and actually spreads out from Northern
Ireland and has an ending that some people might find
difficult to cope with.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: Wow, Well, I can't thank you enough for giving yourself
permission to you know, to write like this and to
be open, because even Sylvester Stallone said that he makes
those movies of Army so authentic, so people don't sit
there and fall deeper in lover have a passion for
something they think is great when in all honesty it's
very dark.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it is, indeed, I mean, and in Hard Rain,
and more so in the Darkness, you'll see the central
character bomb around being dragged deeper and deeper into the
more murky side of a terrorist war. And I perhaps
should quickly explain to the readers that more your listeners
that the name Bomber. It's a nickname in the army
for anybody whose surname is brown, they get called Bomber,
the same as anybody whose names white gets called Shorky.
So it's just a nickname.
Speaker 1: I love it.
Speaker 3: Please come back to this show anytime in the future.
The doors all going to be open for you, David.
Speaker 2: It's very kind of you, and thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 1: Will you be brilliant today, sir, Thank.
Speaker 2: You, thank you, and I'd love talking to you. That
was great.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Looking forward to your next book too.