Budleigh Past and Present

[As the child of a violent alcoholic father I was naturally interested in the celebrations on Cape Cod to mark the 20th year of something called the Clothesline Project, particularly as some of the people involved in its organisation live in Brewster, our sister-town in the US. Domestic violence is a subject that we are familiar with in the UK of course, thanks to government-supported campaigns. But the Clothesline Project, which aims to highlight the issue in an especially vivid way, has really taken off across America from small beginnings on the Cape. Personally I always felt that my own father's combat experience in World War Two had exacerbated his mental problems. That theme of the destructive effects on family life in a post-war society was something that I explored in my book Oundle's War (1995), where the veterans whom I interviewed confessed to having nightmares and feelings of guilt that they endured for many years after the conflict. No surprise then, that as co-fo...