Contribute Your Story Add Your Family’s Chapter
The Stories Behind the Story
Let’s Go Will is not just a novel written in isolation. It is a living literary project built from the memories, voices, and family histories of ordinary people whose lives were shaped by extraordinary times.
Peter and Will may be fictional, but the world they walk through is real. It is formed from villages that still stand, accents that still carry history, and families who still remember. This page is your invitation to contribute.
Share Your Story Help Build Let’s Go Will
Your Family’s Voice Matters
Did your grandfather return from the trenches but never truly leave them? Did your grandmother wait for letters that stopped arriving? Was there a blacksmith, a widow, a farmer, a dock worker, a pilot, or a policeman in your family line? I am seeking real stories, small details, lived experiences not just heroics, but survival. The quiet endurance of ordinary people is at the heart of this novel.
Local History and Village Memory
Each stop on Peter’s journey passes through real places ports, Yorkshire villages, Scottish estates, docklands, and Midlands towns. I welcome submissions about how your village looked in the 1920s, how houses were built, what work people did, what winters felt like, what songs were sung. These details bring authenticity and texture that no textbook can provide.
War, Service, and the Generations After
This story reaches beyond one war. It touches the First World War, the interwar years, and the long shadow carried into the Second World War and beyond. If your family experienced loss, displacement, service abroad, or the emotional consequences of returning home, those memories are part of Britain’s shared inheritance. They deserve space.
Personal, Emotional, and Honest
This project is deeply personal to me. Elements of my own family history including wartime loss, military service, and generational memory are woven into the narrative. I understand that sharing such stories can be emotional. You are welcome to submit memories that are heroic, unresolved, painful, or simply human. There is no requirement for grandeur only honesty.
How to Contribute
You may submit a written memory, a family letter, a diary extract, a photograph with context, or even a recorded recollection transcribed into words. Stories can be brief or detailed. All contributors will be acknowledged where material is used, and every submission will be treated with respect.
Together, we can build a novel that feels lived-in one shaped not by a single imagination, but by a shared national memory.
If you feel a connection to Peter’s journey, I invite you to walk a little of the road with us.
From Victoria Cross to Simple Commendation
The Best of Arts and Entertainment
There are many medal holders whose stories deserve to be told.
While I am not looking only for tales of heroism, it would be an honour to include them. Whether it was a Victoria Cross or a simple commendation, each medal was earned by a young man or woman and sometimes even by an animal — who stepped forward in a moment that mattered.
But this project is not limited to gallantry alone. Courage takes many forms. It lives in survival, in endurance, in quiet duty, and in coming home changed.
If your family holds a medal, a letter, a citation, or simply a story that has been passed down at the table, I would be privileged to hear it.
Every act, great or small, shaped the world Peter and Will walk through.
A Shared Act of Remembrance Built from Real Lives
War and Its Long Shadow
Loss, Survival and Quiet Courage
Loss, Survival and Quiet Courage
- For WWI, WWII, service abroad, emotional aftermath.
Alternative options:
- The Cost of Service
- What Came Home from the War
- After the Uniform
Loss, Survival and Quiet Courage
Loss, Survival and Quiet Courage
Loss, Survival and Quiet Courage
For widowhood, early deaths, resilience, private grief.
Alternative options:
- The Stories That Were Never Told
- Love Interrupted
- Grief and Endurance
Villages, Ports and Places
Loss, Survival and Quiet Courage
For local history, architecture, trades, landscapes.
Alternative options:
- How Your Village Looked in 1920
- The Streets They Walked
- Life Between the Wars
Why This Story Matters
Did your family lose someone in WW1?
Did someone return but never truly come home?
Was there a blacksmith, a pilot, a dock worker, a widow in your line?
Help Us Build the Road North
As Peter and Will walk North,
lets paint a picture of life after the Great War and the social change. For all Britain would never be the same
Help us Build the Road South
As they travel South into Spring, new life and a new beginning was felt throughout the land. Lets find those stories and tell how it was.
The Making of Let’s Go Will – The Journey Across the UK.
A Collaborative Storybook
The Making of Let’s Go Will
Every story shared with this project helps shape the novel itself. Your memories, family histories, and reflections may be woven into the narrative, sometimes with different names or details so that the story fits naturally within Peter and Will’s journey across Britain. In this way the novel becomes a tapestry of many lives and voices, not simply the imagination of one writer.
Alongside the novel, all contributions will also be gathered into a companion work titled The Making of Let’s Go Will – The Journey Across the UK. This separate book (and accompanying online archive) will preserve the original spirit of the submissions. Contributors may choose to be fully acknowledged by name, family, and place, or they may remain anonymous if they prefer. In some cases, a story may simply be identified as coming from a particular town, village, or county.
Together these contributions will form a remarkable record of Britain in the years surrounding the First World War and the decades that followed. They may include memories of soldiers who fought abroad, families who waited at home, farm workers and railwaymen, factory workers and shopkeepers, and the women who stepped into new roles during wartime, discovering freedoms and responsibilities that helped reshape society itself.
The aim is not only to tell Peter and Will’s story, but also to honour the countless real lives that formed the fabric of Britain in the early twentieth century. Heroic or humble, dramatic or quiet, every memory helps build a living picture of the people and communities who carried the nation forward into a new age.