The Shadow of War is a work of fiction. Although largely based on real events (and with many of the characters borrowed from history), all names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used entirely fictitiously.
Many of the characters speak in their local vernacular, especially the old Pennine dialect of North-East Lancashire. Largely gone now, it was still spoken into the 1960s and I remember well its unique colour and warmth. It was an unusual combination of Old English and the nineteenth-century ‘Mee-Maw’ – the exaggerated, mouthed reinforcements of speech used to overcome the noise of the looms in the cotton mills – made famous by comic actors such as Hylda Baker and Les Dawson.
The meanings of various East Lancashire dialect expressions, as well as examples of Cockney rhyming slang and background facts about military terms, Victorian and Edwardian mores and various historical references are explained in the Glossary at the back of the book.