PETER ARMITAGE

I was twenty-two-years-old when my father offered me a partnership in his firm. I baulked at the idea and left home to venture abroad. The odds of success were finely balanced, but I survived and prospered thanks to new openings appearing out of nowhere. The trajectory of my life has been determined more by chance than by careful planning.

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I’m an Aquarian named Peter which should make me both a humanitarian and a rock that others can depend on. I try to fit that mould. When I was a young man, someone told me not to seek good luck but rather stand in the way of it. I have found that giving back to society is one way of expressing my gratitude for that valuable piece of advice.

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Lucky or not, we leave footprints behind when we depart this world. Some fade quickly whereas others stay fresh thanks to the stories we tell and retell about past lives. I did not want the footprint of my mysterious great-uncle, Gordon Dickson, to vanish because there is much to learn from the different ways people conduct their lives and meet their deaths. Family histories are precious heirlooms.

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Gordon’s birth in 1879 is the penultimate entry on a yellowing document, a family tree, I found in my grandmother’s attic shortly after she passed away. I was eleven years old at the time and it was the beginning of a fascination with my ancestors, particularly Gordon whose surname is also my middle name. It is commonplace for parents to choose the name of an ancestor for their newborn and such repetition rarely attracts intense interest, but in this case it did. My stubborn curiosity about being Gordon’s namesake, a Dickson, blew the cover of this enigmatic man.

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My novel is based on the surprising discoveries I made about his life. In the early stages of my research, I was sent a photograph showing Gordon’s name on a WW1 memorial in Lindley, Huddersfield, honouring 101 local men who served in the war. At first sight, this appeared odd because I already knew he had never been in the armed forces. This conundrum was one of several that surfaced during the many hours I spent piecing together numerous fragments of information about him.

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After a silence of over one hundred years, Gordon finds his voice to tell the story of how his luck ran out during a rebellion in China, a revolution in Russia and a homecoming in Scotland. His life was defined by duty and, unlike mine, by bad luck.