September 1941 in war-torn England -- thirteen-year-old Harry Lockwood steps off the train and embarks on his new life at Markham College, a boys' boarding school near London. With his father stationed in North Africa and his mother working in a munitions factory a hundred miles away, he is on his own. Soon, Harry finds himself fighting for survival in a new world where the misuse of power by sadistic prefects creates a closed society ruled by fear and violence. As if this is not enough, Hitler's bombardment of Britain with terrifying V1 flying bombs and V2 ballistic missiles threatens to destroy him. Harry's tale is one of lost innocence, of war, of loyalty and of love.
David Edward Bradley's fascination with foreign places comes naturally. Conceived on the Dark Continent in the British Colony of Nigeria, where his father worked as a surveyor, he grew up in the 1930s. His most vivid childhood memory was seeing the menacing shadow of the Graff Zeppelin floating among the clouds, a portent of things to come.
When he was only four years old, his mother joined her husband in Africa. They were stranded there during much of the Second World War, leaving him with his grandmother. In 1943, his parents returned to England and David moved on to a Public School. It was in a similar location to that in Harry's War, which is to some extent autobiographical. A number of David's war-related experiences are real, but embellished to make them more exciting.
Mr. Bradley admits that his early career as a Research Physicist came about through an aptitude for repairing intricate mechanisms and a timely job at a laboratory engaged in the exciting new field of Electron Microscopy. After several years of ground-breaking research, he gained his MSc and PhD degrees in Microbiology at the University of Edinburgh, and satisfied his wanderlust by participating in scientific expeditions and conferences around the globe.
In 1974, Dr. Bradley immigrated to Canada where he worked at Memorial University of Newfoundland. There, at the easternmost edge of North America where the passage of years is marked by the southward migration of icebergs from Greenland, he continued his research in Microbiology. After retiring in 1995, D. Edward Bradley now devotes his time to writing fiction at his home in Kingston, Ontario.
