This month we’re talking about how one of our characters might react if they were insulted. This is quite a hard one for me because once I’ve finished writing I tend to let the characters lie and move on to something else. If they have more to say, then I write them another book, or a short story. So… I’ve been having a conniption about this for the last month and now here I am the day before the post is due, sat in a coffee shop still having a conniption.

So… for the purposes of this post I’m going to write about Lew and Alec. They are my very first characters from Lost in Time, the first of the London Calling trilogy and they live in the early 1920s.

Alec’s a police detective, in his mid-thirties. He joined the force as his first job (although his family wanted him to be a barrister) and was a military policeman during the war. He’s a measured sort of person, pretty buttoned up, but he does have a temper. He’s hardened or numbed or scarred, however you want to describe it, by his time at the front like most of his contemporaries.

Lew is a newspaper photographer/journalist. He’s a bit younger than Alec, in his late twenties or early thirties by this point. However, he was born in the mid-1980s. He’s a quiet sort of person too, much less assertive than Alec and with a completely different life direction. He ended up in the 1920s because a magical accident pulled him back through time from 1916 to 1921.

When I started writing Lost in Time in 2016 we were in the middle of the centenary of the First World War. I was very conscious of the men I knew in my childhood who had been through that experience and the stories my grandmother, who lived from 1894 to 2000, told me. In later years I also became friends with Mr AL’s great aunt, who’s father was very twisted out of shape by his wartime experience. Essentially there was a whole generation of men with PTSD. I had the idea that I wanted to contrast that experience with someone born a hundred years later. The time-travel bit in the book was pretty much incidental, a plot device to allow me to explore that contrast, which soon spiralled out of control into a fully fledged universe of hidden magic.

So where does that leave my characters in their reactions to hostility directed toward them?

Alec is definitely on much more of a hair trigger than Lew. There’s a scene in the book where he finally loses his rag with Lew, goes for him physically in the police station and has to be dragged off him. I think I drew that from my conversations with Mr AL’s great aunt, who talked about how her father came home from the war with a drink problem and a terrible temper. Apparently one of the women on their street told her off when she was angry with him, telling her that before the war he was the most gentle, genteel man she’d ever met and it was his experiences that were making things hard for him, and the rest of his family, now. So I’d say that Alec is rather like that; he keeps his trauma bottled up and quite trivial things can set him off. His natural inclination is to be a calm, steady person, but his experiences have made him much more of a loose cannon.

Lew though, is much more sanguine generally. He’s been through the care system, he’s was a journalism student and he hasn’t been through the physical and emotional meatgrinder Alec and his contemporaries have been subject to. He’s pragmatic in the same way Alec is; but his trauma is different. He comes across as a much softer person, although inside he has a core of steel. His reactions are more tempered generally. Yes, he loses his temper. But it’s not cataclysmic for him, it doesn’t leave him feeling blown to pieces afterwards like it does Alec.

Scroll on down to read the snippet from Lost in Time that inspired this post.

Lost in Time: Alec finally loses patience with Lew

(CW: Violence)
They sent a uniform to wait for Tyler at his flat, but in the end, he came to them. Alec watched him walk into the detective pen proud as you please, cap and goggles dangling from one hand, fishing in a leather bag slung cross-wise across his body with the other. He didn’t see Alec until Alec walked right up to him and planted him a facer. 
He stared up from the floor between two desks, kicking backwards as he propped himself up on his elbows against the grubby carpet to escape further blows, eyes slightly glazed from the punch and papers and photographs spilling out from the bag all over the place.
“You lied to me, you bastard.” Alec’s opening lacked style, but it got straight to the point. “You did know him.”
He pulled Tyler up again by the front of his overcoat for the pleasure of slamming him face down on to the nearest desk and wrenching his arm up behind his back. He was driven by an almost unstoppable desire to manhandle him. The other man had been pushing his buttons since they had first crossed paths and both his anger at being lied to and his frustration at the case exploded into furious violence. There wasn’t much space—the office hadn’t been laid out with prize-fighting in mind, a small, calm part of his mind observed—and he ended up with Tyler flat on the table, pressed underneath him with his arm wrenched up behind his back, both gasping for breath.
“You fucker! You lying bastard! Did you kill him? You’ve known him from the start and I’ve been running round like a blue- arsed fly trying to work out what’s going on. What the hell is happening?” He jerked his arm up a bit higher, eliciting a yelp of pain that the other man tried to mute. “Start talking, else I’ll break your arm.”
It felt good to be hurting someone. He stifled the thought.
Tyler’s arse and thighs were taut against him as he held him down and the man shifted uneasily as Alec added more pressure to his arm. He had got like this in France sometimes. Every so often he’d become overwhelmed with the monotonous daily grind of investigating Tommies who’d crossed the line—who’d turned their hand to investigating Tommies who’d crossed the line—who’d turned their hand to a little unsanctioned murder, other than Jerry, of course; or been caught forcing the local girls, or worse. There’d always been something dirty and disgusting he’d been tied up with and it had sickened him. He’d been able to hold it in check for long periods, sometimes longer than others. But eventually, his disgust and frustration had always boiled up from the black, sticky pit of silence he jammed it down into every morning when he first rolled out of his tiny camp-bed and put his feet on the floor.
He’d beat a man unconscious once—he’d been caught forcing a child in one of the little French villages close to the lines and he’d been shot, in the end. But Alec had worked him over first. He’d had to be pulled away by his sergeant. He was ashamed of it. He believed in the rule and process of law; but in France that had been ramshackle at best and he had been as ramshackle as the structure of military discipline within which he’d been working.
The only thing that would empty out the sticky, tarry pit of self-disgust had been violence. Or sex. Or sexual violence. The man underneath him gasped and writhed again and Alec realized he was still putting an almost breaking pressure on his arm and pressing close against his arse. He took a breath and stepped back a little, easing his grip.
“Okay, you bastard!” The man’s language didn’t shock him. “Back the fuck off and let me go and I’ll talk. For fuck’s sake!”
He stepped back another half step and then another and released Tyler’s arm cautiously, tensed for a continued attack. Instead the man pushed himself to his feet and cradled his arm against his chest, turning round and glaring at Alec venomously. “You arse. You didn’t need to do that.” He was clearly in pain. “I knew you’d find out eventually. I needed to check a few things, first.”
Grant stepped up next to Alec and put a hand on his arm. “Perhaps it would be better to take this into your office, sir?” He took a painful grip on Alec’s elbow and propelled him through the door for at least a semblance of privacy. Grant looked at Tyler, who was cradling his twisted arm against his chest and looking decidedly ropey. “You, come here!”

Lost in Time (KU) from the London Calling Trilogy (Box Set)