The influence of my father’s stories on ‘Little Pieces of Sophie’ and ‘Eating the Heart of the Dog’

My father was born in Manchester in 1904. When he was eighteen, his father accused him of stealing a tie that had been gifted by an aunt. Believing the tie was meant for him, my grandfather told my father to leave home. Soon after, my father joined the 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards, a cavalry regiment that was deployed to Risalpur, India, in 1923. After a long march through the heat, my father's horse collapsed and died from exhaustion. He had formed a strong attachment to the animal and was devastated. But he was even more horrified to learn that his fellow soldiers had cooked and served him the horse’s heart without telling him.

This story deeply affected me and later became the inspiration for a scene in Eating the Heart of the Dog. Because Harry, the character who appears in both Little Pieces of Sophie and Eating the Heart of the Dog, is twenty years younger than my father, I adapted the story to a different historical context. In the novel, Harry is a prisoner in a Japanese POW camp, where he is tricked into eating a stew made from his beloved pet dog. The title Eating the Heart of the Dog serves as a metaphor for the novel’s central theme: the horror of betrayal, especially when one is led to enjoy something only to later discover its terrible origin.

After returning to Manchester, my father attended night school and taught himself the principles of electronics. During the Second World War, he worked in radar research at Metropolitan Vickers Electrical Company in Trafford Park. He married his first wife, and they had a daughter.

After the war, disillusioned with his limited career prospects as an unqualified electronics engineer, he decided to seek work in Africa. With his wife and daughter, he began planning an ambitious overland journey. His daughter later wrote a memoir of their travels, which I drew upon when writing Eating the Heart of the Dog.

They bought a surplus Canadian Army Chevrolet van, and—using library books—my father taught himself how to convert it for long-distance travel across deserts. In October 1946, they left Manchester, crossed to Oostende, travelled through France to Marseille, and took a boat to Algiers. From there, they journeyed overland through Tunis, Tripoli, Benghazi, Cairo, and Khartoum, eventually arriving in Nairobi.

My father found work with the East African Power and Lighting Company and settled in Nakuru, in the Rift Valley. His daughter was sent to boarding school in Nairobi. A few years later, after divorcing his wife, he took his daughter to Kampala, Uganda, where he secured a post with the Uganda Electricity Board.

Before the war, my father had received subsidised flight training in a de Havilland Tiger Moth. While in Kampala, he befriended a man who owned a private plane and invited him on a trip to South Africa, sharing the costs. On the way, they stopped at a mine in the Congo. Weeks later, my father learned the man had been arrested for diamond smuggling.

He later met my mother while working at the Electricity Board, and I was born in Kampala. When my father eventually returned to England, he brought with him a collection of taxidermied animal feet, ostrich, rhino, and elephant, crafted into various receptacles, mostly associated with smoking. As a child, I was fascinated with these artefacts and was naïve as to how they were obtained.

When writing Little Pieces of Sophie, I was eager to incorporate these objects. Much of the father-son relationship between Jack and Harry in the novel is autobiographical.