Behold the Dark Gray Man

Katharine Campbell’s father Sholto Douglas was the hero of her childhood, an unconventional senior commander in the Royal Air Force, described as ‘a gloriously contentious character’. Following childhood abandonment and poverty, Sholto rose through the ranks of the fledgling RAF in WWI before taking on a crucial role in the Second as head of Fighter Command and going on to serve as military governor in Germany in the war’s devastating aftermath. But when Katharine was five, he began to be stolen away by strange night-time wanderings and daytime distress. The doctors called it dementia, but decades later, Katharine started researching her father s story and realised that she had observed the undiagnosed consequences of PTSD – a hot topic today.