Cut The Canary’s Claws

Push those thoughts down. Bury them deep. Hide them from yourself. Hope they never return, but you know they will…

After a short spell in the trenches in 1915, Jack Cunningham, a miner from the North-East of England, finds himself recruited as a tunneller to dig mines under the German lines, becoming involved in the underground warfare between the two sides.

Telling his story through a series of flashbacks, he is tormented by a voice inside his head, questioning his memories and his obvious guilt at surviving when others didn’t, swinging between varying states of confusion and control over his situation and over what is and isn’t real.

Why this is happening now? All Jack knows is that he wants to confront the past and feels driven to resolve the conflict rising up inside him.
As he uncovers more of this hidden life, his three closest friends, Sirindha Singh, a 6’ 5” Indian lieutenant, Billy, a fifteen-year-old boy soldier, and eighteen-year-old Percy, re-appear to him and Jack recalls their part in the build-up to the Messines Ridge battle, in which the British detonated twenty underground tunnels in the biggest explosion of the war, signalling the start of the battle of Passchendaele.

In the final hours before this explosion Jack’s memories and the voice become more erratic and violent until they eventually lead him to his own personal revelations, their unavoidable consequences, and at last a final and true resolution.