When my paternal grandfather Fred wrote a letter home to his younger brother Dave from the Western Front during the Great War, he penned this poignant line, ‘Don’t take this on at any cost’.

My great-uncle Dave, who stayed at home to run the property in his brother’s absence, may well have thought otherwise until the family were notified my grandfather had received a shrapnel wound to the head.

My grandfather was lucky. He survived and eventually returned home to our family property, married and started a family.

Like many veterans my dad said his father never spoke of the war and dismissed the subject if it came up in conversation.

To the outside world it, undoubtedly appeared that my grandfather had closed the door on that part of his life, but the lingering aftermath of his war time experiences manifested in a subtly powerful way.

Every morning, grandfather would walk out the front door on our property and rake a good fifty yards around the perimeter of the homestead.

He did this every single day he was on our property until his death in 1955.

My dad, first as a boy and then a young man eager for the workday to begin, could never understand this time-wasting exercise and grew increasingly frustrated over the years.

Nicole Alexander’s grandfather, Fred Alexander.

On occasion my father and grandfather would argue about this habitual raking, but still my grandfather kept at it.

Every single day.

I never had the privilege of knowing my grandfather and I guessed the repetitive raking was his way of making a sort of mental order of the chaos he’d endured during the war.

I imagined he was trying to control his environment when for many months at the front he’d been unable to.

And perhaps this daily routine also grounded him and set him up for the day ahead.

But then I read accounts of soldiers in other wars from World War 2 to more recent battles in the Middle East where the raking of dirt was a means of checking for enemy infiltrators.

Suddenly my grandfather’s daily raking took on new meaning. Was he checking the perimeter for traces of an intruder? An enemy long conquered on a property thousands of miles from any battlefield? I will never know.

Fred Alexander’s notification of wounding.

This personal story has stayed with me and led me to write The Limestone Road.

I selected the period 1944 for the novel and wove a tale centred on the fictitious characters Canning Christie and his father Michael as they take up a soldier-settler block in the south-east of South Australia, following their return from active service in the North African campaign.

How they navigate their father-son relationship, the women who try and carve a place in their lives and the inhabitants of the farming district they move to, is an exploration of what for a great many veterans can be a difficult component of war, coming home.

Nicole Alexander

Website: https://nicolealexander.com.au/

About The Limestone Road

In the summer of 1944 returning soldiers Canning Christie and his father Michael arrive in South Australia from the desert sands of North Africa.

Canning carries the trauma of war and a fractured memory of a terrible event, while charismatic Michael resumes his womanising ways, intent on concealing his own secret wound. The Limestone Road is a stirring narrative about one young soldier’s courageous journey ‘home’. It is a story of resilience, love, and the enduring power of dreams, expertly interwoven with historical detail and emotional depth to create a novel that will resonate long after reading. Lauren Chater, author of The Beauties, wrote: “The Limestone Road is an elegant meditation on how we process and deal with our past. It’s a novel about healing and confronting the truth, about finding the courage to fight for our beliefs, even if it means leaving behind everything we know. Nicole Alexander’s exquisite prose made this book a joy to read.”