BY ROGER WATSON

When I heard that Frederick Forsyth’s 1975 novella The Shepherd had been made into a Christmas film, I was uneasy and curious in equal measure. I was captivated by Forsyth’s 1971 The Day of the Jackal, both the book and the original film, but slightly less impressed by The Odessa File published in 1972. However, my mother was a great fan of Forsyth (except his politics) and when The Shepherd was published in 1975 I took it home from university for her as a Christmas present. She loved it and it sat on the bookshelf, surviving various downsizes, until the day she died.

I hope spoiler alerts are unnecessary as I imagine a great many readers of Country Squire Magazine will have read The Shepherd. Essentially, it is a Christmas ghost story. It is very short and easily read in one sitting. The plot focuses on a post Second World War Royal Air Force pilot flying home from continental Europe, over the North Sea, to England for Christmas. His instruments fail, including his radio. He becomes lost, with low fuel and assumes he is going to end his days in the North Sea where, if he crashes, he will be unlikely to last ten minutes.

Forsyth was a Royal Air Force pilot during his national service and flew the De Havilland Vampire, the plane featured in The Shepherd. He conveys very well the utter loneliness of being several miles up in a deserted night sky and the knowledge that danger always lurks, even with a full set of instruments.

With fuel down to minutes before the plunge, another plane appears in the sky: a Second World War Mosquito bomber piloted by a mysterious person, ‘The Shepherd’, with whom radio contact is never made. The Mosquito guides the Vampire to an airfield and then disappears into the night sky. On landing at the airstrip and being collected by someone from the airfield, the supernatural element of the story begins to unfold.

Having watched the film, which is only 38 minutes long, I searched for my mother’s old copy of The Shepherd. I was sure what I had witnessed was far from a faithful representation of the book. Unfortunately, following a massive lockdown clear-out followed by a significant downsize when our book collection went from the thousands to the hundreds, The Shepherd was lost. My wife denies responsibility, but lawyers for both sides have been contacted. In the meantime, Kindle to the rescue and for £0.99 I had an e-copy of The Shepherd.

What struck me about the novella was the sense of loneliness referred to above, not only during the flight but at the moment the pilot takes off. The action in the book begins in the cockpit; in the film it starts outside the officer’s mess with a snowball fight and then many a jolly jape in the mess before the main character is told he can fly back to blighty for Christmas. At this point he commits a cardinal error of military cinematography; he salutes his senior officer…without his hat on!

At this point I knew we were in trouble.

He takes a walk through the mess, where for the period being portrayed, people of colour are possibly a tad overrepresented, and is greeted by lots of ‘lucky bugger(s)’ by his fellow officers who will spend Christmas on the base. There is a cutaway to the most twee of English country homes bedecked with wreaths and falling snow where his lovely girlfriend is excited he is coming home. That didn’t feature in the book either.

The flight is reasonably faithfully represented and even uses some of the monologue (the radio had failed, remember) from the book. But the cutaways to thoughts of home and a warm embrace are another unfortunate embellishment. Then the mysterious Mosquito appears in the sky piloted by none other than John Travolta. With his genuine piloting skills, he may well have been flying it himself.

So far so good, but we can’t have John Travolta just sitting in a plane, so he contacts our main character by radio. As alluded to above, this is not in the book where the flight takes place without any verbal communication, only hand signals. Of course, our pilot lands safely and our Shepherd disappears into the night sky. Thereafter, just as in the book, he is picked up by someone from the airfield and the supernatural element unfolds. Suffice to say this aspect of the story is gratuitously embellished.

In Forsyth’s foreword he describes the provenance of the book and how it only got published by accident. This was not the only attempt to film The Shepherd, but previous efforts did not fly. He visited the set and met Mr Travolta; happy he had shown such an interest in the story.

Whether his joy was sustained after he saw the film is not yet a matter of record.

Frankly, it is a good enough film, diverting and mercifully short. For anyone who has not read the book the events will seem amusing, touching even, and the supernatural twist at the end will finish it nicely. But in adding so much, the film has taken so much away from the atmosphere of the original story.

The film pays credit to the many Royal Air Force pilots, the ‘Shepherds’, who searched for crippled planes over the sea and guided them back to safety. I must say this was the first I had heard of these brave men, and it seems Google has not heard of them either. Am I alone in thinking they never existed? Probably cue for a deluge of emails to the Editor-in-Chief…

Roger Watson is a Registered Nurse and Editor-in-Chief of Nurse Education in Practice.