I hope, eventually, that Mrs. Jack will give the OK to post the "final" versions here at Mudcat. We both pestered Jack about finding a publisher, but he was too modest to let us pursue it in his lifetime. Anyway, without an OK I think I'd be wrong to publicly post what I ended up doing with everyone's wonderful clues. I think you would like the result.

I can describe in generalities, though, what I did.

One thing I did to increase readability was to restructure the paragraph breaks. The vast number of short paragraphs made for a pretty choppy read; I adopted a style whereby any action or thoughts that follow a dialog entry are included in the para opened by the spoken word-- except of course for points of dramatic shift or significant elapsed time, or a change of speaker.

I broke up and clarified some of the longer sentences where the necessary punctuation had really gotten in the way and where Jack's writing style became too similar from para to para to para. He had tried delberately to vary his sentence structure on the first batches, but as he got sicker and weaker, it was obvious that he'd been in a rush just to get the stories onto paper.

Also I sparingly applied a few of Jack's other stylistic conventions, to his earlier-written stories, that I had seen him use in the later group.

Through all my work on this round, however, I did only those sorts of things that Jack himself either routinely did, himself, or agreed to if I made a suggestion. As I re-read them, now-- they are very much the Jack I knew, and I am grateful that he trusted me to see him clearly through his effort to tell the stories. His first talent was his art-- he was a well-known and prolific watercolorist whose keen eye for composition underlies much of his story-telling approach-- and writing was a more recently discovered form of expression.

Of all the changes I made, I most regret not having had Jack's own latest version of Sarah's loss in the Blitz. I had asked him for a new, final paragraph mentioning her, after the list of updates on the rest of the gang, and he wrote a powerful one. I didn't have it. I had several choices-- leave it alone; leave the story out of the collection in case his version turned up; or write a line in the spirit of what he had written in the new version. I took the liberty of adding the line you all saw, to be sure that Sarah ended the story that really was all about her. But Jack's para was more personally evocative. I lost sleep over that one, trying to decide, but I slept fine once I made up my mind that JACK TRUSTED ME, and went ahead and added it.

You see, Jack knew and appreciated that I had seen HIM inside his restrained writing, and that I often tended to draw him out most in those areas he most wanted to share more deeply... and wasn't sure how to go about it.

I never cried when Jack died several years ago. This last week, partly because of the wonderful help that immediately and steadfastly came from people I don't know at all, I've been able to shed the tears a man like that desrves. He was just a dear, dear man. And every inch the troublemaker he describes in his stories!

~Susan