"I don't regret the things I've done, but those I did not do."

“Do you have any regrets?” Shure was once asked.

“Just one,” he replied.

He left his interviewer guessing about what it was.

Having mapped out the man’s life in this book, might it be possible to identify it? Possibly. 

The most obvious and common regret that men often have in their old age is about a failed marriage or poor parenting. Peter Shure could definitely have done better by his kids and his wife. But there is never a moment in all the records of his life that he expresses any genuine concern or care for Helen Grosvenor, or Isabella and Christopher Shure.

In this story, the Shures can barely be called a family; more a collection of individuals – loners. There are no partners or second wives, step-dads, cousins or long-term lovers in this story. The only grandparent is exiled, presumed dead. Even the minor characters - Martin, Devon, the Belovices – all die alone. Only Isabella, Helen and Martin make it into the 21^st century.

So no, I don’t think Peter Shure regretted these relationships, because, when it came down to it, he refused to recognise them as anything fundamentally important.

For a man so steeped in film and personal fantasy it was hard for reality to break through.  Or perhaps it’s better to say that Peter rarely *allowed* reality to break through. He was too busy moving from one film production to the next, one country to the next, dreaming up the next version of himself even before the old one had been completed.

To live life on film sets is to be able to avoid the strictures of the everyday. To be able to make a living falling asleep on those film sets is to remove oneself from real life twice over. It is not so strange, in these circumstances, to see how life could hardly touch Peter Shure, and only once could it elicit a feeling of regret.

So if it was not his immeidate family what was it? His self-imposed separation from his mother? His professional fall-outs with the likes of Belmondo and Attenborough? His brief entanglement with Belovice’s network of mafiosi and terrorists? Something about a particular project or performance maybe? A failed romance?

No. I don’t believe any of these truly touched Shure.

If anything bothered him in his work life, he was well used to falling asleep and waking up with a fresh mind and a clear conscience.

We have to think, instead, that it was something that managed to invade his subconscious and haunt his dreams. Only one moment from his life caused him regularly to wake up crying. And that was his experiences during the war. And the one experience in the war that he never honestly spoke about was those last days in Barth.

It is all quite blandly set down in the diaries, with not much emotion. But Richard Attenborough had the right instinct when he thought of making this the heart of a proposed film ‘War Damage’.

The key scene in my imagined screenplay would be a visit to the camp in Barth that Shure describes as ‘a field of dead and dying skeletons’. Shure  - to be played by Robert Downey Junior? - protests when his Russian liberators suggest shooting everyone in the camp and burning the place to the ground. He steps into the crowd of diseased and dying prisoners shouting ‘No!’.

The rifles of the Russian soldiers now train on him. He has a moment of decision. Die with the skeletons or step back and live amongst the killers. He chooses to step back. And this, I might suggest, is the one regret.

From that moment on, Peter Shure was another person. In his mind, he had died there and then. And, from thereon in, he was in another world, assuming a different persona – a more cynical, remote person who considered life, as he was living it, as an illusion - an insubstantial charade when compared to the concrete brutish reality of standing in a field of skeletons with a dozen Russian rifles aimed at his head.  

Peter Shure did not do the right thing. He did not stand alongside the lice-ridden, starving victims of Nazism and Stalinism. He did not die a martyr. Instead he survived. He thrived even, creating a life for himself with a shape he was utlimately doomed not to see. In his dreams he could recreate a different ending for himself, one that freed him from the travails of modern life, family life, any life at all. In his dreams, his existence after 1945 could be one long sleep with no regrets at all.

War record show that the camp was indeed burned to the ground. But there is no record of what happened to the prisoners. No mass grave has ever been found. The number of people were transported back into the gulags of mother Russia is unknown. The incident now only exists in a single diary entry and in the dreams of Peter Shure.

Peter’s one regret? I suggest it was that he felt obliged every morning until 1990 to wake up and carry on living.