First I will give you a moment in the desert. It is my letter of confidence, without which I am some uninteresting stranger you have happened upon...
After the end of the Great War, "Lawrence of Arabia", national hero and international figure, hid from celebrity by rejoining the armed forces at the lowest ranks under assumed names. In the winter of 1934/35, as Aircraftman Tom Shaw, he finished his military service on a project in Bridlington, on the Yorkshire coast.
Here, Tom Shaw tells his own story of that winter by the sea. Of the gradual fray and final destruction of the curtain he holds between himself and the world; or are his days of hiding simply over at last? The young woman who stirs feelings and memories he had long set aside; is the quest that last took him across deserts now begun again, or is romantic endeavour dead under the wheels of a simpler, less demanding love?
The Melt: Aircraftman Shaw's Last Winter is an exploration of identity, image and fragile self-worth. "Aircraftman Shaw" finds every routine day conjures his past and forces him to review as moments replayed and events relayed, his peculiar outlook on his legendary life and the way it ended, for him, in London, more than a decade before.
