EVERY novel needs a theme – an idea which underpins the story and moves the reader to think.

Love, hate, injustice, envy, revenge: all are common human motives and we've all read novels where they drive the story.

The theme of my first work, A Lonely Road, is that as we age, so we look back, most of us not without a certain degree of regret. Whatever we may think of shaping our future, we cannot change the past. It's there – set in stone.

A Lonely Road took this idea and set it in a mediaeval context. The streets of York and Wakefield, the depths of an English forest - these formed the backdrop.

I'm currently working on a full-length novel, A Cause To Mourn, set in a German town on a single day in 1960 and seeing the war in flashback through the eyes of four people – three men, one woman.

There's a central incident, based on events at a Ukrainian orphange in August 1941, though I won't say anything more so as not to give the plot away before I even finish writing the novel.

The work shares a similar theme with A Lonely Road: the past must be confronted for what it is. Germany, for all its present prosperity, still faces the need to live with its troubled past.

A recent German film, The Last Days of Sophie Scholl, tells the story of a young Munich undergraduate arrested by the Gestapo for distributing anti-Hitler leaflets. Those who resisted the Nazi regime are now seen as heroes by their fellow countrymen.

Working on the novel meant a great deal of research into the German side of the war: the final months of peace, the Phoney War, Dunkirk, the invasion of Russia, the chaos of the Normandy Front in the aftermath of D-Day.

I may not be writing History, but the facts must be truthful and accurate all the same.

In writing the novel I'm no less aware of what's going on today. 2019 will mark the eightieth anniversary of the start of World War Two, and the ranks of those who witnessed what happened at first hand are thinning out.

Britain now faces a referendum on whether we stay in the EU or not. In that the EU was expressly formed to prevent a conflict like this occurring again we at least have some obligation to consider the issue carefully in that light.

The novel explores, through the eyes of several Germans, both what we are now and where we think we are heading. Hopefully, in the process, it will prompt the reader to draw his own conclusions.

The next ordinary meeting of the Airedale Writers' Circle is scheduled for Tuesday August 11 at 7.30pm at the offices of Sight Airedale, Scott Street, Keighley. The meeting on Tuesday this week was the Circle's annual general meeting and was intended to members only.

Please contact Peter Morrison on 01535 601943 or e-mail p634morrison@btinternet.com for further information.