Under the Cover: The Cipher that was Genni Gunn’s father’s wartime past

Writing novels for me has always been an engrossing, fascinating process, and my new novel The Cipher is no exception. In fact, it is probably the novel most close to my heart, because through it – and by this I don’t mean the research and process – I came a little closer to understanding my father, who died decades ago, when I was too young to ask him who he was.

During my childhood, my father had always been a mystery, weaving in and out of my life like a film star, in his convertible Alfa Romeo, dashing and handsome in his starched uniform. I recall him best, perhaps, as the father I’d seen in photographs taken before my birth, black-and-white photos, in fragments and brief glimpses. We knew nothing about his past, his wartime experiences, what drove him to spend hours alone reading in his study.

Then, in 2012, 40 years after my father’s death, I was visiting my mother in Ottawa, helping her move, and she suddenly produced a suitcase containing my father’s personal items. Some of these were puzzling: a British passport in which my father appeared above a fictitious name; a British Soldier’s Paybook, 96 letters written between he and my mother in 1943-44; various certificates attesting to and thanking him for his service with the Special Operations Executive and in No. 1 Special Force, in the “Cause of Freedom.”

My brother Leo and I were intrigued. Who was this new father I knew nothing about? What was No. 1 Special Force? And Special Operations Executive? My father had never spoken of his war experience, and my mother knew only that he had come to Italy with the British. She had originally believed he was Maltese.

And so, my brother and I embarked on an extensive search, he in the UK and I in Italy, to try to figure out what it all meant. We discovered my father had been recruited into Churchill’s Secret Army – the Special Operations Executive (SOE) – to fight a clandestine, guerilla war against the German Nazis and Italian Fascists.

Definitely novel material, I thought.

Although the UK National Archives began releasing Special Operations Executive related files to the public in 1998, our search was made difficult partly because in 1973, a fire had destroyed some 16 to 18 million official military personnel records, and partly because many files were continuing to be protected until after the death of individuals named in them.

Sadly, though we followed the traces of SOE into Italy, and read books and files in which my father was named, few of his personal experiences or movements are documented, beyond some locations and activities – Kenya, Cairo, Algiers, Sicily, Salerno, Ischia, La Selva, Rutigliano, and ending at the SOE headquarters in Siena in 1945. What we don’t know are what his activities entailed, and how he felt about it all. My father was sworn to secrecy and he took those secrets to the grave. “We had been trained to forget,” one of his colleagues said.

My fascination with SOE grew as I read files, listened to first-person accounts in the Imperial War Museum Archive, and discovered the many young men and women who were willing to sacrifice themselves in the fight for freedom. And so, I began to create a story, imagining Nino – a young Italian man – and Olivia, a young British-Italian woman, both recruited into SOE and soon coming together.

For the longest time, I couldn’t find my way into the novel, partly because I knew little of my father, and inventing him felt like a betrayal. Over the next 10 years, I began various attempts at this novel, parts of which made it into the final version. However, it wasn’t until I created the Olivia character that the story came into focus. I was able to abandon the idea that I was writing about my father, and I concentrated instead on the What If? of composite characters I could create within the framework of SOE, as well as highlighting SOE women’s essential contributions to the cause.

Although this may sound easy, it was anything but. I completed one draft after another – eight drafts in total – and I don’t mean editing, but real re-envisioning: changing points of view, deleting scenes and characters, beginning in new places, and so on. At one point I had five major characters all vying to tell their stories, and I had to be ruthless. I collapsed two females into one, got rid of another character altogether, deleted long tedious storylines, and little by little, draft by draft – and year after year – I came to the finished version of The Cipher.

It has been a great experience, and one, I might say, that is not so different in process from my other novels, which also took years and a multitude of drafts to come together.

Since that first startling discovery of my father’s hidden past, I have spent many months over different years doing research in Italy, and my brother has spent a comparable time doing research in the UK. Some of that research made it into the novel, and gave me some insights into my father’s character, given what he must have experienced during the war. But even this could be my own conjecture.

And isn’t that what fiction is all about?

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Genni Gunn is an author, musician and translator. Born in Trieste, she came to Canada as a child. She has published fourteen books: four novels – The Cipher, Solitaria (longlisted for the Giller Prize), Tracing Iris (made into a film, The Riverbank), and Thrice Upon a Time (finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize); three short story collections – Permanent Tourists (finalist for the ReLit Prize), Hungers, and On the Road; three poetry collections – Accidents (finalist for the Di Cicco Poetry Prize), Faceless, and Mating in Captivity (finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award); and a collection of personal essays, TRACKS: Journeys in Time and Place (finalist for the CNFC Reader’s Choice Award). As well, she has translated from Italian three collections of poems by two renowned Italian authors: Text Me by Corrado Calabro, and Traveling in the Gait of a Fox (finalist for the Premio Internazionale Diego Valeri for Literary Translation) and Devour Me Too (finalist for the John Glassco Translation Prize) by Dacia Maraini. Three of Gunn’s books have been translated into Italian and Dutch.

As well as books, she has written an opera libretto, Alternate Visions, produced by Chants Libres in 2007 (music by John Oliver), and projected in a simulcast at The Western Front in Vancouver; her poem, “Hot Summer Nights” has been turned into classical vocal music by John Oliver, and performed internationally. Before she turned to writing full-time, Gunn toured Canada extensively with a variety of bands (bass guitar, piano and vocals). Since then, she has performed at hundreds of readings and writers’ festivals. Gunn has a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. from the University of British Columbia. She lives in Vancouver.