"If there had been no one else to see, I would have put my arms around him"

My latest reading is a deeply obscure novel called The Cage, by Dan Billany and David Dowie. It's an autobiographical story about their imprisonment as POWs in Italy during the Second World War, and has been described as "the only book about POW homosexuality from the homosexual point of view." (I'm paraphrasing as I had to return the source, Adrian Gilbert's POW: Allied Prisoners in Europe, 1939-45, to the library, but you get the gist).

The fact that the book even exists is a miracle. When Italy surrendered in 1943, the commandant of the camp Billany and Dowie were in defied German instructions and allowed all his Allied prisoners to leave and make their way to Allied lines as best they could. (In camps where this didn't happen, the prisoners were transported to Germany.) During their voyage, Billany and Dowie chose to leave their manuscript in the care of an Italian family who had helped them, with instructions to mail it to England when they could. Along with a third man, Alec Harding, Billany and Dowie made it nearly to the Allied lines but then disappeared in the Apennine mountains in late 1943. Presumably they died there.

In 1946, the people who'd been left the manuscript were finally able to send it to Billany's parents, and it was published in 1949.

Billany and Dowie were probably lovers. ( click to read more )

Yuletide recs, part 1

I've been very very slowly reading through Yuletide, cherry-picking the fandoms that interest me most, and I have a few recs to share from the first half of the alphabet.

( 13 recs in 10 fandoms )