At Forged Truth Publishing, we are delighted to announce that David N. Martin’s epic follow up to ‘The Typewriterists‘ (winner of the 2025 Norman King Award for Fiction) will be published by us on 31st July 2026. THE MODERN TYPE takes the Havershalls’ story beyond the Second World War, as the next generation finds its way in the world and battles for control of the family legacy.
We’re pleased to offer you an extract from the first two chapters here:
Chapter One – April 1945
Seated behind the pilot, she spotted the de Havilland Mosquito before he did, a shape fleeting across the moon. Her pilot was busy, fighting to release their Messerschmitt’s auxiliary fuel tanks and swearing in German. The auxiliaries were empty and only dregs of the main tank remained. The engines droned onwards, painfully loud. For how much longer, who knew? They had not yet reached the coastline of northern England.
For hours she had been whistling the Marseillaise to keep her hands from shaking, staring at his flying helmet, the worn brown leather creased like old bark, his blond Aryan tufts showing through the cracked seams. She had managed to stay calm until now, thinking of past happiness, the French Riviera, and beyond that to an English childhood.
“Mosquito!” she shouted, poking at the pilot’s shoulder and pointing.
“Scheiße!”
She read the curse from his lips as he turned his head. Scheiße was the right word. She’d studied planes. Everyone did. Mosquitoes had a wooden frame, a material from the wrong war, but its lighter weight made Mosquitoes fast and just about strong enough to carry light-duty cannons. Dangerous, in other words. Her pilot banked their Messerschmitt hard right.
Too late. A fist-sized hole ripped through the cockpit window. Blood and viscera and tatterments of leather splattered across the clear plastic. She felt the sharp shower hot against her skin. She screamed, but there was no one to listen. The engines drowned everything.
She did not know how to fly a plane, or how to jump from one when the pilot was dead.
#
She had spent five years in the shadows for the SOE – British Special Operations. ‘Susanne Klum’ was the seventh name she’d taken and peroxide blonde the third disguise, each to escape the last. She had felt the war winding down for months, heard it in crackly radio bulletins, illegal broadcasts that leaked into Prague:
Almost half a million German soldiers captured in the Ruhr!
The Russians have taken Vienna!
Advancing British and American troops meet up south of Berlin!
The end was in sight, but hope is a strange and dangerous thing – oxygen to burnt out fear. She might reach that end alive, which sharpened each moment when she might not.
In Prague, the SS had rallied to hold its grip. She was squeezed in by the enemy’s death-throes as the local Resistance gathered its efforts to break free. She counted herself a survivor of Operation Anthropoid, had witnessed the reprisals, prisoners shown the heads of their relatives in jars to extract the merest morsel of information. No one had betrayed her, and she was already guilty of too much luck.
#
The dead pilot was Dieter Meitner. He had been a trainer for replacement bomber crews, holding the rank of Sonderführer in the Luftwaffe. Turning against his fatherland, he had smuggled her onto a plane fitted with the huge drop tanks necessary to make the distance. She had assured him of fair treatment once they reached safer ground. After she identified herself to the British authorities by her real name, she could vouch for Meitner. Or, at least, she had planned to. She could be English again and call on the Havershall name, if that connection proved necessary. Wealth and privilege would come to her rescue.
Their twin-engine Messerschmitt BF 110 had taken off from Pilsen, an airfield fifty miles south west of Prague, during an air raid by American P-51s. Other German pilots scrambled their planes rather than leave them grounded like sitting ducks. Chaos held the chance of escape, if you were brave and bold and desperate. The Allied forces were still two hundred and fifty miles away.
It might as well have been all the way to the moon. That day, one thousand slave workers were herded into a barn by Nazi troops and burnt to death, hours before the winning side arrived.
#
Three days earlier on a rainy afternoon in the middle of Prague, beneath the sheets in an attic apartment not far from Charles University, Susanne Klum had been woken by the telephone on the floor below.
It rang on and on. Her lover, Bernard Brendt, put his hand on her arm.
“Leave it,” he said in clipped German.
Brendt was private secretary to General der Infanterie Rudolf Toussaint, the Military Commander in Prague. He was forty-one years old, bespectacled, nineteen years her senior. It was hard to say whether he had seduced her, or she him, so skilfully did she play her part. She was an actress, trained years before by the Resistance in Paris. Against the pillows, secrets had been bled from Brendt over the previous twelve months.
“It keeps on ringing, Bernard,” she protested. “And no one is around on a weekend. If it is for downstairs, I take a message. I won’t be a moment. I come back.”
“Alright,” he said. “Make me some coffee.”
That afternoon he had told her that the German position was hopeless, that the Germans would soon be leaving the city, that he wanted to take her with him. He offered her marriage. That was unthinkable.
She always hid her gun in a shoebox under the floorboards before he came visiting. Out of reach now. She laughed and picked up the lacy dressing gown from the chair, the gown he’d bought her on his trip to Berlin. She hurried out of the bedroom barefoot, through the front door of the apartment and down a flight of stairs. The shared telephone on the wall was still ringing.
She lifted the receiver. A voice in Czech said, “Give me your telephone number.”
She missed the middle digit. That was the code. She lowered her voice. “You’re not supposed to call here, except for an emergency.”
“Listen carefully, the cell is broken. Two of us taken. They will know you are a Jew. You must leave now.”
“Leave?”
“I’m sorry. You know the rendezvous.”
The phone clicked dead. She paused for a moment, the receiver clutched to her chest, then placed it in the telephone’s cradle and went back to the apartment.
“I’m making the coffee,” she shouted to Brendt, ensuring her movements around the tiny kitchen sounded convincing.
“Who was it on the telephone?”
“For Anna, my neighbour. That young lieutenant wants her to call him, so he can tempt her with the shiny things you Germans give to local girls like us.”
“I do not think your friend can be tempted. She is a tease. Unfuckable.”
Susanne reached into the kitchen drawer and found the sharpest knife. She had never killed with a knife before. Now it was necessary.
#
Meitner had insisted she strap on a parachute pack ‘just in case’.
“Gravity will take care of it, as long as you avoid the propellers. Count to five before you pull the cord. After that, you will land one way or another. Alive or dead.” He said that in German – ‘Lebendig oder tot’. It had an unsettling finality.
Thinking back, that was the last thing he’d said before helping her aboard.
Now the pilot-less Messerschmitt soared onwards, throttle set. His ruined head lolled from side to side, body held in by the seat belts. Were they over land? How high did a jumper have to be for a parachute to open?
Shuffling towards the empty rear gunner’s position, she banged on the locking mechanism, trying to release the Plexiglas canopy. It made sense to jump towards the rear of the plane, didn’t it? She kept whistling that same French tune, trying to think.
The canopy opened a crack, then tore off its hinges, flying away in the backwash. The engines were louder now and raw, the air like a hurricane. She could see nothing except grey cloud below, but the plane had started falling. She felt sure of it.
She clambered onto the fuselage, fighting the wind, clinging on as she tried to swing her legs out over the side. She had missed the training given to agents dropped into position, but wouldn’t it be better to fall feet first than head first?
One engine coughed and stuttered. The plane yawed; her hand slipped. Wind took her backwards, the tail fin catching her a glancing blow. Then she plummeted. Straight down. Gravity will take care of it.
Five was too far to count. She got as far as three, then pulled.
She felt a tremendous tugging under her arms because she hadn’t tightened the straps properly. The wrench was painful until she realised her only hope was to slow down and the tugging was the parachute doing its job. After that, she welcomed the pain.
She fell through cloud into darkness. Land or sea, she couldn’t tell. Death waited either way, and knowing that steadied her. There is always greater calm in pessimism.
Lines emerged from the gloom. She took them to be the hedges around fields. Here and there, she saw darker patches, clumps of trees maybe.
Not water, then. Something harder. Something faster than drowning.
She was sure you were supposed to bend your legs, to yield, though not too much because you could ram your knees into your chin and probably break your neck.
Scattered houses went by beneath. A pond. A church. She could not gauge her height. She wiped her hand across her cheek, found a leather fragment still stuck there. She rubbed until it fell away. Belatedly, she remembered about steering with the straps, raised her hands above her head, pulling furiously to guide the last of her descent.
She missed a chimney, boots glancing off the soft thatch of a roof. The parachute swung her across a farmyard. A tractor rushed past. The ominous jaws of a barn yawned before her.
She hit an open door. Which was better than a wall. But only just.
Nothing after that seemed to register.
Chapter Two
On the morning of 26th April 1945, the day after an unknown woman crashed into a barn door, William Havershall was driving his father’s Rolls-Royce Phantom into the city of Birmingham. The road from Stratford was becoming ever busier by the week. The move of the Havershalls out of Birmingham’s centre had been his mother Ginny’s decision, not taken on the basis of practicality and now the traffic was returning as the war wound down.
Eustace, his father, sat next to him, reading the Daily Express, coughing sporadically and complaining about the news.
“The promise of a better world,” Eustace quoted, smoke curling from his cigarette. “Maybe… maybe.”
Yesterday, according to the Daily Express, the ‘United Nations Conference on International Organization’ had begun in San Francisco. Countries who had joined the Allies by the previous month were invited to sign up.
“It seems the rats who missed the ship are now jumping aboard. Look at this – a list of countries who have now declared war on Germany in order to join an organisation pledged to keep the peace. Isn’t that absurd?”
William said nothing. They drove onwards, through the leafy suburb of Shirley, then into the tell-tale wastelands of Tyseley and Small Heath. Here the Luftwaffe had strafed everything, targeting the factories embedded among houses, randomly destroying some streets and leaving others untouched, as if God had squished the city with His fingers spread. Rubble stacked like fallen cliffs; mortar lined roads. The buildings still upright had walls scorched or burnt black, sheets of corrugated iron for windows. Pedestrians were few and far between, huddled figures sucked dry of colour. The bombing may have stopped, but reconstruction had barely started.
He didn’t know what to make of it all. He was the younger of the Havershall sons by two years, six feet tall, captain of his boarding school’s sports teams, blessed with his father’s powerful physique and the blue eyes his mother had given both her boys. Look close enough and it was possible to see a slight asymmetry in William’s gaze; the result was a quirk that made him inexplicably more handsome. On the face of it, he had been gifted everything, except the chance to serve. At seventeen, the feeling of being too late consumed him. He felt guilty because he wanted the war to last so he might catch it up, and yet the streets reminded him why all wars should stop.
They reached Marmaduke Lane in the Bordesley suburb where the factory and offices of ‘Havershall and Woodmansey Typewriting Ltd’ rose like a pale grey blancmange behind iron railings. Frequently whitewashed and rapidly re-stained by Birmingham’s smog, there was an administration block, nicknamed ‘Duke House’, and a series of huge production buildings called the ‘Duke Works’. By some miracle, only a couple of the outbuildings had ever been hit by Nazi bombs.
William pulled up in the slot marked ‘Managing Director’, stepped out and took a breath. The smell of these streets – cokey and acrid – assaulted the lungs. All the joy of his day was over. No more Rolls-Royce.
By contrast, his father saw ‘Managing Director’ as his cue, emerging from the car transformed. Within the corridors of Duke House, his perpetual limp disappeared, as did all the symptoms of the cold he’d been suffering. He became someone different. Someone important. More important than a father.
Over the years, journalists had written magazine articles and even a book about Eustace Havershall, the lacemaker’s son who pulled himself up ‘by his bootstraps’ and married the niece of an English lord. He was a survivor and hero of a previous war. In the present conflict, he’d worked for the Ministry of Aircraft Production, while his company had stopped making office machines to manufacture military components instead. Here he was now, the image of success – slick Saville Row suits, shoes from personalised lasts and a Homburg hat from Christy’s of London. It was all show, of course. Privilege was a delicate thing, not respected if not displayed and soon lost if the image lost its shine. Now he was almost fifty, the greying hair and a little extra weight made him appear distinguished. No one called the company by its full name these days; it was always Havershall’s.
Employees greeted him with a polite ‘Good morning, Mr Havershall,’ and, in the character of Managing Director, he replied with their first name, a king honouring those who had done sterling service in his palace. Eustace’s knowledge of them was proof of their value. He gave it out for free.
Today he could offer them a greater intimacy. He could say, “Oh, have you met my son? William hasn’t been here for a while, but he’s home for the Easter holidays, so I’m giving him the tour. William, say hello…”
It would light the people up like a streetlamp and they would go on their way beaming. William found it frightening. It felt like being in a film his father was directing; no one was who they pretended to be.
He followed as his father headed along the corridor connecting the offices to the works, reaching a door marked ‘Employees Only’. The faint rumble of production became clatter and white noise as the door swung back. A blast of hot air hit them in the face. They emerged thirty feet up with a cavernous roof above them and the factory floor below, a quarter-million square feet of machinery, more than three football pitches of space, every worker in the blue uniform of Havershall’s.
“Did you know we topped two thousand employees last month?” Eustace asked as they were descending a winding metal staircase. “Not our only factory, but still our biggest.”
Eustace stopped at the platform half way down to admire the view. A bronze statue stood on one side of the platform, a cloth capped figure looking outwards.
“I had him moved here to remind me.” Eustace patted the statue on the shoulder. “Sometimes I like to gaze out with Woody at this sense of order, the guarding around the working parts. We care about safety here. I’m proud of that.”
William read the plaque fastened to the statue’s working boots: “Joseph ‘Woody’ Woodmansey, Co-Founder, 1897-1939.”
“Woody died in a car crash, same one as gave me this gammy leg,” his father said with a hint of nostalgia. He put his hand to his thigh, as if the injury might not be clear, now the limp had been discarded. “I was lucky, always lucky.”
“Didn’t I used to call him Uncle Wood?” William leaned on the rail so he could look back into the statue’s face. “And his daughter… Celia used to come with us to Mum’s villa in France. She played tennis with me and Dick.”
“The Woodmanseys were full of tragedy,” Eustace said, smiling painfully.
William stood next to the statue comparing heights, his eyeline passing across the top of Woody’s head.
“I remember him being much taller than me.”
“It seems you grew. Time will do that for you. Sometimes I stand here, Will. I ask myself, ‘What is our purpose?’ It used to be a question we could answer, Woody and I. The ministry orders have stopped and who will buy typewriters rather than bricks and steel when there’s no buildings still standing to put them in? It’s a challenge.” His father stopped and shook his head ruefully. “We’re always up for a challenge at Havershall’s.”
And with that, he walked down the stairs, leaving William to trail behind. At floor level, he headed for the door marked ‘Jim McCann, Production Manager’. Several blue-uniformed workers crossed their path and were treated to Eustace’s imperial greeting and an introduction to William. Twenty yards to McCann’s office took almost two minutes.
McCann was a Havershall’s legend. Even William’s mother told Jim McCann stories at the family dinner table. Sixty-two years old now, face withering, deaf in his right ear, his voice like hard core in a cement mixer. Throughout the war, he had kept a box of time cards for employees who had been conscripted. McCann clocked them in and out every day. If a telegram came, if he learned of their deaths, he would hand the card to Eustace. The pair would gather in the boardroom, drinking a deferential shot of whatever spirit happened to be available. Eustace had received forty-four cards: forty-one men; three women. McCann would go with him, visiting sad darkened homes, delivering money to relatives. McCann always knew the addresses. His Production Manager’s office was a cave of wonders, smelling of machine oil and tobacco, full of half-finished typewriter parts and piles of edge-worn production drawings.
“Jim? Alright to come in?” Eustace said as he and William entered. His voice was softer now. He slumped into the visitor’s chair next to McCann’s desk. Playing ‘owner and son’ was no longer necessary.
“Brought the young master, I see,” McCann said. He shook William’s hand.
“One of them, for sure. Richard’s in Ceylon. His mother’s on tenterhooks waiting for letters. I tell her, he’s hardly likely to get shot, working in Mountbatten’s headquarters.”
“Mother’s building a hospital today,” William chipped in.
“A hospital? Most impressive,” said McCann, sounding like he already knew.
“Ginny is off with her charity work. Back tomorrow, that’s the plan,” Eustace explained. William’s mother managed the offices three days a week. She looked after receipts and payments. Tomorrow was Wages Day.
“She has to raise the funds for her hospital. It’s quite the undertaking,” William said.
His father cut across him. “Any problems to report, Jim?”
“Some materials arrived for the Mark II H50s at last, Mr Havershall. Not as much as we needed, but we’re still short of orders anyway. We’re setting the production lines again, but typewriters ‘ent picking up as fast as we expected. I’ve cut overtime. Oh, and by the way, Raye’s down from Nottingham for the monthly meeting.” McCann broke off and looked across at William. “That’s Ramona Cropper to you, Master Will.”
“I know who Raye is,“ William said.
“Yes, of course. Sorry. Anyway, she’s somewhere in the factory right now. I know she wanted to show you the electric, Gaffer.”
Eustace nodded.
“What’s the electric?” William asked.
“We’re building an electric typewriter,” said McCann. “Always the dream, that was. Now we’re doing it proper.”
He winked at William. “It’s a beauty. You’ll love it. Make sure he lets you try.”
“I..I can’t type,” William confessed.
“Oh, really? Me neither. I just make ‘em. Men don’t have much to do with typing.”
“What else is there to tell me?” Eustace interrupted, eager to move on.
“Ah, yes, Mr Havershall. Hughie Evans says, ‘Thank you.’ His problem with that spiv – the loan business – that all got cleared up. Soon as you put a word in. And Maisie’s wedding, that’s on Saturday. We’re sending flowers. Diane has arranged it.”
William recognised the name. Diane Hall was Office Manager, his mother’s assistant. She ruled everyone with an iron rod on the days his mother dedicated to charity.
“Mrs Hall always sends the flowers. Births and deaths and weddings if we’ve arranged them,” McCann added for William’s benefit.
“What’s that mean? Arranged?”
His father smiled.
“It’s a delicate matter,” McCann replied.
“You can tell the boy plainly, Jim. Young Maisie got herself knocked up, Will. You know what that ugly phrase means, I take it?”
McCann said, “Maisie’s from the typing pool upstairs. And the father, Henry Tythe, he works for us on the machining centres down in the works. Decent setter. Blew a couple of fingers off in France. That’s why he’s home, see? Hungry for his oats now. They all are when they get back alive. Not so keen on marriage though. He had to be persuaded.”
McCann made it sound sinister. William wondered what persuasion might consist of.
“Henry ran off to Coventry, see, Master Will. Tried to get a job with someone over there. Only we have dealings in many pies. You ever been to our factory over that way? It’s in Radford, near where Daimler burned down. Anyway, you can’t escape Havershall’s so easy. Your dad knows every owner in every town. We brought young Henry back. Soon ready to do the right thing, he was. Some might call it a shotgun wedding – and we’ve arranged one or two when the young ‘uns here get over excited – though we’ve never needed an actual shotgun, not with Mr Havershall’s influence.”
William looked at his father. Eustace seemed vaguely embarrassed and started to rise from his seat.
“Let’s find Raye and her prototype then, shall we? Don’t cut the overtime yet, Jim. Build some machines for stock. Orders will come, I’m sure of it. It’s all almost over and I believe we’ve won again, as much as it’s possible to win a war.”
#
William’s trip to Duke House was a last-minute thing, unplanned and unwelcome. He had been eating breakfast with his parents at the Havershall residence in Stratford-upon-Avon. His boarding school had extended the Easter holidays because of an unexploded bomb near its sports hall. He had nothing to do; his friends were scattered around the country.
“Drive me into Birmingham,” Eustace had suggested. Part offer, part command. “I have a meeting at the Ministry in London tonight, so it’s a long day and I’ve still got this fearful cold. Might be flu.”
He paused to blow his nose into a handkerchief.
“Your mother isn’t coming in, so I thought we could visit the office, do the day work, have some lunch. You could drop me at New Street for the train and drive the Rolls back here. How would that be?”
“He’s offering you a royal tour,” his mother said. Sometimes Ginny Havershall seemed to think her husband needed translation. More often than not, she was the only one he listened to and the one who understood him best. She was the rock of the family. All domestic arrangements were hers, the house was hers, the dining room they were sitting in was her vision. Nothing ostentatious, but nothing cheap either. Art Deco style crept across what had once been Georgian. An oil painting of the Havershalls’ wedding, produced from a photograph by an artist she’d commissioned, hung over the fireplace at one end. The expanse of the linen-draped dining table – eight place settings when three were needed – maintained a respectful distance between diners. Distance was both the curse and privilege of wealth.
“I think you should accept the bribe,” she suggested to William. “You like driving.”
Leaning across, she patted him on the back of his hand as she poured more tea. His mother had a subtle smile for every occasion and she always smelled of a delicate perfume, Royal Bain de Caron, amber and vanilla and musk. To William, this was always the smell of home.
“I’m offering the boy a chance to drive the Rolls and be my chauffeur. Why wouldn’t he jump at it?” Eustace asked.
“Do you expect him to wear a chauffeur’s uniform? I think he’ll look the part,” Ginny said. She also had sarcasm down to an art.
“A suit will be sufficient. No call to be scruffy, though I can hardly afford the cost of a chauffeur or his uniform these days.”
“You have never had a chauffeur,” she pointed out.
“And now it seems I will never have one, what with tax above nineteen shillings in the pound.”
She turned to William, ready to translate again. “He doesn’t have a chauffeur because he likes driving, just like you, but now we will have to hear his complaints about the economy.”
“Gin, I do not mind that the government takes all my money to fight a war, but if Attlee and his Labour Party get in, they’ll want to keep the rates, establish a system we can’t afford and buy up useless industrial assets that won’t be worth ninepence in the long run. I’m all for improving the lot of the poor, but what will that do? Starve Britain of private investment, while all our war heroes come back with their heads full of promises. They’ll find nothing but rationing and austerity.”
“Your father – the working man – has become a devotee of Churchill,” she told William. “Strange, because after that other war, Churchill was the villain who had forced tanks on the military and killed too many of the crews. When first I met your father, Churchill came to a party and Eustace wanted to rush over and punch him.”
“I can’t vote Labour and can’t vote Tory either. I used to drive those tanks,” his father said.
“Everyone knows you drove tanks, my dearest captain. You’ve got medals, but what of it?” She laughed and William understood that, in some strange way, she was winning the exchange.
His father smiled. “Aren’t you supposed to be off with your charabanc of toffs? I suppose it’s into the promised land today? Isn’t that what your glad-rags are for?”
Ginny had come to breakfast in a Hardy Amies’ skirt and jacket, something beyond what she normally wore for office days.
“If you mean my cousin and I have arranged for some important ladies to visit the hospital in Derbyshire with me, then yes,” she said.
William’s father winked at him. “Your mother has used her cousin – the Viscountess Fairchild, don’t you know – to corral some aristocratic ladies into a trip where their charity can be tested. This so-called hospital is on the old Buckley estate. Gin is still a Buckley at heart.”
“A Buckley and proud of it. I am president of an injured soldiers’ charity, Eustace, so yes, we need money. And don’t you dare talk about tax again.”
“Will, it seems you can go to a hospital with your mother’s rich old ladies, stay here and be bored, or drive my Rolls-Royce. The choice is yours.”
“What would I do at your works all day?” William asked.
“Flirt with my office girls and get in the way of their work, I imagine,” his mother said.
William blushed. Boarding schools didn’t teach boys how to talk to girls. Perhaps that’s why he never understood his parents. The competition of petty jibes seemed to hold them together. They were extraordinary and they seemed happy, happiest when in some sort of gentle competition.
“Sounds like the Rolls wins,” his father concluded. His mother laughed again.
Eustace stood up and Ginny began straightening his tie. It was always William’s mother who applied the final polish.
<….continues….>