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Lord of the Flies, first published in 1954, is an adventure story - in a way. It starts on a pristine beach with white sand, warm sea, abundance and beauty. And then everything goes horribly wrong. While the horrors of Lord of the Flies are a triumph of the imagination, Golding also had memories on which he could draw. By 1945, after the revelations of the concentration camps, the 'medical' experiments, the slave labour, the gas ovens, he had, as he says in his essay 'Fable', 'discovered what one man could do to another'. During the Second World War, he spent several years on active service in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. He spent months on active service in the North Atlantic, serving in HMS Galatea, a cruiser involved in the pursuit of the Bismarck. Later he worked in a weapons research establishment, and found himself involved in the process of designing methods for killing the enemy. Then, as a sub-lieutenant and later lieutenant, he commanded minesweepers and 'rocket ships', landing craft converted to carry enormous amounts of fire-power. He commanded one of these on D-Day, backing up the invading troops in their struggle up the beaches. During the invasion of the Dutch island of Walcheren (October-November 1944), he saw again at first hand the terrible cost of war for the combatants.
In private conversation with his family, Golding spoke of other consequences of that action. He recalled visiting his commanding officer in hospital very shortly after the Walcheren Operation, and finding in that same institution many terribly wounded civilians, the inhabitants of the area around the small village of Westkapelle, which he and his comrades had shelled. He said he had been told that Westkapelle had been evacuated, but after his visit to the hospital realised that this had been a half-truth of war, designed to preserve his efficiency in shelling the shoreline. It may even be that in retrospect he realised he had been insufficiently suspicious of this assurance. Of course, he acknowledged the justness of the war, the necessity of the action - and actually we eventually sailed to Walcheren in the early 1960s and found no sign of a grudge against the Allies for their actions - quite the reverse. But this did not dissolve his sense of blame: Walcheren remained a bitter and unmanageable memory for him, often surfacing unexpectedly and ungovernably, provoked by surprising associations.
Before Lord of the Flies, Golding completed at least two other novels, one of which he sent to publishers without success. He later explained that he had been writing other people's novels. At length he was able to start, as he put it, writing his own books. The genesis of the first of these novels was a conversation between him and his wife, after they had read to their children and put them to bed. The book had been a story of children on an island without adults. Golding, a schoolmaster but also as he says 'a son, brother and father', said to his wife that things would not really turn out as they had in the storybook. He did not believe that real children would behave like that. She replied that the idea was a first-class one and he should write the story.
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