When I Come Home Again by Caroline Scott - the true story that inspired the book

When I Come Home Again was inspired by a true story from France. In 1918, a confused man in a military uniform was wandering on a Lyon railway station. He couldn’t remember his own name, or how he’d got there, and couldn’t give details of any home or family. He was wearing no dog tags, carrying no identity papers, and the number of his regiment had been torn away from his overcoat.

The man was transferred to an insane asylum, where, for practicality’s sake, he was given the name Anthelme Mangin. Over the months ahead, his doctors would try various therapies to trigger his mind into recall, but Mangin was actively resistant. He came up with false names and addresses to make the questioning stop. It quickly became clear that he just wanted to be left in peace.

In 1920, photographs of a number of amnesiac former soldiers were published in the French national press, in the hope that someone might recognise them. Brief physical descriptions were also given – heights, hair and eye colours, and distinguishing marks – but with his average height, mid-brown eyes and mid-brown hair, Mangin’s details could have fitted many men.

And so hundreds of people now asked themselves: was this their husband, their son, their brother who had been reported missing in action? Nearly 300 families came forward and requested further information, 126 asked for an interview, and twenty of these would eventually pursue their competing claims through the courts.

The press became fascinated by this story, calling the amnesiac ‘France’s Living Unknown Soldier’. Mangin symbolised the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who had disappeared, and became a focus for the country’s grief. Dozens of newspaper columns were dedicated to debating what he represented, but in this process, he stopped being an individual with needs, fears and hopes of his own. He was a metaphor more than a man.

Litigation would continue, without resolution, for the remainder of Mangin’s life. The court cases were still going on as war broke out again, in 1939, but they would never be concluded. Mangin died in a hospital in Paris, in 1942, probably from malnutrition. He was buried in a common grave.

In writing this novel, I wanted to try to look out through the eyes of the nameless man, and sense how he felt as hope and tragedy spiralled around him. I decided to set my story in the UK, in settings that are familiar to me. When I began researching the post-war treatment of amnesia in Britain, I came across scores of other similarly heartrending cases, and, as in France, the British newspapers of the 1920s were full of stories of wandering men who’d lost their memories. The public wanted to believe that the missing might still find their way home one day. It’s the fierceness of this hope that I found striking. As well as a novel about loss, When I Come Home Again is a story about the strength of the human spirit.