Stephen Lewis talks to Liz Moran who has turned her grandfather's memories of the First World War into a novel.

LIZ Moran was 12 years old when she showed her grandad a photo of her new penfriend.

It was 1962, her school had just 'twinned' with a school in Germany in an attempt to build bridges after the war, and her pen pal's name was Regine Beckenbauer.

Liz's kindly grandad's reaction to seeing the photo shocked the little girl.

"He took one look at the picture, threw it on the floor, and said 'all seeds which have sprung forth from the loins of Germans are evil'," she recalls.

At the time, Liz didn't understand her grandad's obvious hatred. It was only years later when she began to research her family history and turned to her grandfather for stories that all became clear.

What emerged was a harrowing, traumatic story of tragedy and loss in the First World War - a story that Liz has now told in the form of a novel, Six.

Six is the story of five brothers, the Jacksons, and one friend, Albert Seal, who served in the First World War. It is narrated in the first person by Liz's grandad, John Jackson.

In 1914, the Jacksons lived in Brunswick Street, York. At the age of 16, John and his best friend Albert, both pupils at Archbishop Holgate's School, turned up at the drill hall in Tower Street, York, to enlist. They were both too young but, by stuffing their shoes with newspapers to appear taller, managed to convince the enlisting sergeant they were older.

"They were just boys," Liz says. "It was all fun. It was all about playing at soldiers."

Except that it wasn't. The two friends - sworn blood brothers - were sent for training to Strensall. By April the following year they had been posted to Belgium with the West Yorkshire Regiment (Prince of Wales's Own).

By the end of July, Albert was dead - shot through the head on a desolate Belgian battlefield while John stood beside him. The bullet that killed him grazed John's head first. The account of this incident in Six, told through John's own eyes, is harrowing.

John, already shell-shocked and weary, is staring out from the trenches, pondering on the hell that is war, and looking at the military policemen posted at the entrance to the trenches to prevent desertion.

There's a whiz-bang, and John reels in shock, having felt a bullet graze the side of his head.

He turns to Albert, standing beside him, in shock and relief - only to see his friend crumpling to the ground, "instantly halted in life, shock frozen on his face, stilled by the bullet which passed me on its journey straight through Albert's head... His innocence, his boyhood dreams now gone, taken from him by a bullet which had been meant for me."

Her grandfather never recovered from the shock and guilt of that moment, Liz says - guilt caused by the conviction that he should have been the one who died.

As the war ground on, three of his brothers also died; Robert, aged 27, of wounds in November 1915; Matthew, aged 32, of wounds to his legs in April 1918 and George, aged 33, shot by enemy aircraft in June 1918.

Of the six young men who enlisted at the beginning of the war - the five Jackson brothers and Albert Seal - only two survived: John and his brother Fred.

Throughout the war, it was the memory of his childhood sweetheart Alice Johnson that kept John going, Liz says. With the war over, the pair married and John became a station master, at Brafferton and then Kippax, near Leeds. He also fulfilled a pact he'd made with God during the war: that if he survived, he would become a lay preacher.

But the scars hadn't gone, Liz says. When the Second World War broke out, her grandad was so traumatised that he suffered a form of psychological paralysis that left him confined to a wheelchair.

Six closes with John and Fred being re-united, the only two of the band of six left alive: and with John and Alice's wedding.

But she hopes it will stand, Liz says, as a testament to all the Jacksons who died - and to the thousands of young men who sacrificed their lives between 1914 and 1918.

Six by Liz Moran is available from Moranweb Press, 50 Massingham Lane, Scawby, N Lincs DN20 9AZ, priced £12.25 (which includes P&P).

Liz Moran is also keen to hear from any members of the Jackson or Johnson families still living in York. Write to her at the same address.

Updated: 15:42 Friday, January 13, 2006