The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month holds special meaning for many. It’s also when barely known, if at all, but never forgotten relations and total strangers who gave their lives for freedom are commemorated. Commemorated, not celebrated, because who could celebrate something like 67, 000, 000 people worldwide dying in the first and second world wars alone? You can somehow celebrate the bravery of those who fought and died to protect their Country and their mates, but how can you do anything other than mourn the tens of millions of non combatants who ceased to exist as a result of war?
The word ‘armistice’ comes from the latin word ‘arma’ meaning ‘arms’ and ‘statism’ meaning ‘a stopping’ At this time of every year there are services and parades that help people born almost three generations since the cessation of hostilities of world war two remember that sacrifice. This is an account of my family, my wife’s family and others experience of conflict close to where I grew up. There wouldn’t be a family in the UK without a similar story.
As a child in England, I remember the parades in the village I grew up in through my years spent as a cub, scout and sea scout, where we marched proudly to the music played by the boys brigade band, we fidgeted through the last post being played at the local memorial and we flicked boiled sweets at each other during the following church service.
I bought into the whole Baden Powell legend of how scouts were used during conflicts to perform reconnaissance against the enemy in order to gain a military advantage. As a boy, I day dreamed during the countless hours I spent crawling through the predawn damp, misty woodland with my air rifle hunting rabbits that I was actually a soldier, sneaking up on an enemy who was about to attack my unit. By means of several well placed shots and a last minute berserker bayonet charge into the middle of them, I had defeated the enemy, survived the winning of the Victoria cross and had been sent back to Blighty to convalesce from several nasty looking, but non disabling wounds to the admiring glances of the young ladies in the village. I think the rabbits died laughing at me…
In the first world war, a young local man whose family had lived in the English village I grew up in had been killed in an artillery barrage whilst serving in France. His bereft parents had created a memorial park in his name so that he would never be forgotten. His name was Lieutenant William Lisle Rockley MC
William Rockley is commemorated beautifully in a peaceful location near the river that couldn’t be more different from the place where he ceased to physically exist, but he lives on in the memories of his family and villagers like me.
In Mrs Jerry’s family, her paternal grandfather Sidney was too old for military service in the second world war, but he served his country as an air raid warden and rode motorcycles throughout the blitz in order to lead ambulances through the bombed out streets. He was also an accomplished Jazz musician but tragically, he was killed when he was knocked off his bike by a drunk driver, leaving a widow and orphaned children.
He was obviously very proud of the motorcycle
Sidney’s widow Kate met a gentle man named Louis at the British Legion and she married him. Louis eventually became our village lollipop man (a crossing guard for the children coming home from school) and when he told Kate that he’d been a “conchie” or Conscientious Objector during the war, she thought that he was very brave and his name was the last one on her lips as she died. I don’t know his story, or what happened to him as a result of his beliefs and I wish I did, but it wouldn’t have been good as many CO’s had a very hard time of it in military prison. Others served very bravely as stretcher bearers and medics.
Mrs Jerry’s maternal grandfather Stanley, was married to Mabel and he was classified as unfit to serve as a result of childhood TB. He drove trucks up and down the country delivering food and other essentials. When Nottingham was bombed, the house next door was destroyed, with the family inside.
Mrs Jerry’s late father Peter, had spent the blitz in an air raid shelter and he did his national service in the RAF Regiment. It was the end of the war and he’d won a round the world trip as a bodyguard to an Air Marshall for being the best recruit. His experiences in Singapore, where there were still a few lost souls from the recently liberated Changi Prison, never left him. He was a very special man and I miss him.
In my own family, my paternal grandfather Charles was part of the non combatant ‘land army’ of workers who fed the country and provided the means to fuel the desperate fighting not that far away to the east. As I got older, I learned that he was probably what would have been unkindly called a ‘spiv’ during the war. He was certainly a farm worker and later a trader of necessities but not necessarily of luxury items.
My grandmother Violet and their young family no doubt suffered every bit as badly from the deprivations following WWII, but I did sense his regret whenever the subject of the war came up in conversation; as if he was embarrassed by not having medals to wear on Englands most special days. That generation was never openly affectionate to each other in public and for me, he wasn’t easy to know; nor was he an obviously warm individual, but I did get the impression that he was at least fond of me in his own way. Grandfather Charles attended the remembrance services but being a teetotaller, he avoided the groups of old soldiers who frequented the Royal British Legion bar afterwards. Perhaps part of the reason for that avoidance was survivors guilt?
Many years after the Falklands war (which I missed as I was just a bit too young and was in the process of joining up), I attended a reunion of my old Royal Marine Commando unit. Most of those attending the reunion had bravely served in that conflict and there really was a special bond between them. All of them, in their teens and early twenties at the time had sailed away, not knowing if they would return or in what state they would be in if they did. The organiser of the reunion read out King Henry the V’s speech (as written by Shakespeare ) before the dinner. That speech encapsulates the inferred shame and guilt perfectly.
“Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day”
Although I eventually did see active service with them, it was hard to not feel shame that I hadn’t been there with them on their St Crispin’s day.
My maternal grandfather Ernest or Ernie, did fight. He had a chestful of medals and who never walked past an open pub door when he could enter, was the total opposite. His war was initially fought in Italy, Africa and Palestine with our local regiment; the Sherwood Foresters, and in later years with anyone who hadn’t served in uniform or who got in the way of his drinking.
Ernie’s ‘St Crispin’s day’ was at the battle of Anzio in Italy. He told me a few stories over the years with tears in his eyes when he was ‘in his cups’ but the story I remember most was when told me that he was too proud to ask for compassionate leave when his first wife, my grandmother, died and instead he went AWOL for the funeral. This resulted in him being busted back to private from acting sergeant.
I was once given an old car of his, an Austin Allegro, which had done less than 1000 miles in all the years that he owned it. The Allegro was certainly one of the ugliest cars ever to have been built outside of the soviet union and it even had a square steering wheel, but it was in pristine condition at the front, on the drivers side and at the rear. The nearside was a mass of scrapes and dents gained during his daily obstacle course back from the pub. I’m afraid that I inherited his affection for the bottle and his parlous mental state, but luckily not his habit of drunken driving.
When I was serving, my grandfather liked to talk about me to his mates at the pub and often said that we were the only ones in the family who “were keeping the war going” At the time, I was very flattered, but as I matured I became aware that he wasn’t the nicest of men to those closest to him and I only saw him on the rare occasions that I wasn’t overseas and on leave when both of us were usually hell bent on our next drink. When I left the service, he hardly ever spoke to me again. There was that inferred shame that I had left the ‘family business’.
I often wondered what a one to one meeting between my grandfathers would have been like. One, in the others eye’s, a teetotal ‘Arthur Daley’ like character, metaphorically (as he was quite short) looking down his nose and the other, a drunken bully swaying slightly as he knowingly asked of the other where he had served in the war. Conflict, pride, guilt and alcohol can make arseholes of decent men.
Right now, I’m sitting in Singapore at two minutes to eleven writing this and I’m feeling quite emotional. There are so many men who never made it to my age and got to live, love, marry and have children. I did and I’m a lucky man.