Work in Progress - Thin Ice
What happens when the war comes home?
Italy, 1944. On the Anzio beachhead Allied troops are fighting for their lives. Young men watch their friends die around them and grow old before their time. From some of the most brutal conditions of the Second World War, two wounded men return to England.
Corporal Danny Lock has a wife and children waiting, but the war has changed him. He is bitter and disabled, traumatised by nightmares, and his young wife Rachel, determined to revive their marriage, struggles to understand the man her husband has become. But as his hostility grows and the distance between them widens, all her hopes for the future begin to fade.
When Captain Kit Andrews is posted to a nearby officer training unit, he calls to visit Danny. His attraction to Rachel is instant, but the tension between the two men seems to stem from an earlier time. What happened in Italy to make Danny so hostile to an officer he once admired and trusted? And why has Andrews come to visit him in the face of it?
As a triangular relationship develops between them, the ghosts of the war are hard to shake off. Both men must try to come to terms with all they have seen and done, each in their own way relying on Rachel to reach some understanding.
Torn between the two of them, Rachel is faced with her own searching questions about the nature of love and of loyalty, and the need to live with the consequences of our decisions.
Following the interwoven stories of three people striving to recapture a normal life, Thin Ice is a moving and intimate exploration of the devastating legacy of the Second World War.
