In Graham Swift's novel Shuttlecock (1981), the narrator, Prentis, invites the reader to recall a particular moment in the creation of the cultural memory of the war: ‘You remember in the early and mid- fifties, when the actual after-effects of the war were fading, rationing was ending, there was a whole spate of war books and war films.’ Prentis's Dad's memoir, also called ‘Shuttlecock’, is part of this ‘spate’, and Swift's novel focuses on the son's attempts to grasp what it might mean to have ‘a war hero for a father’ (Shuttlecock, p. 50). Over the course of the novel, Dad's status as a hero, and therefore the status of ‘Shuttlecock’ as a text, is brought into question; this questioning is hinted at when Prentis distinguishes between the ‘actual after-effects’ of the war and representations of the conflict. Whereas Tess in Remake sees widely circulated representations of the war as having no real bearing on her own wartime experiences, Dad is able to situate his story within a burgeoning cultural imaginary. That Prentis, whose only knowledge of the war comes second-hand, is placed in the position of weighing the truth claims of his father's story has an impact not just on Prentis's understanding of the war, but, of course, on the father-son relationship. Involvement in secret war work is thus seen to have effects that leak down to the next generation.