Year Zero

This post has been inspired by “Year Zero: A History of 1945” by Ian Buruma.

Being born in 1969 I grew up with the Second World War.

This possibly seems an odd statement to make but it is true.

Throughout the seventies WWII was there. Ever present through the medium of the comics my dad used to buy me – Battle and Action – through toys like Action Man and model Spitfires which, despite the air superiority of the Hurricane, was the one that caught everyone’s imagination. And through the good old “war film” that the BBC and ITV would roll out every Sunday afternoon. Before I was familiar with algebra I was familiar with The Guns of Navarone, A Bridge Too Far and Von Ryan’s Express. My grandfather occasionally showing me his medals and my Nan’s reminiscences of working in a munitions factory during the 1940’s made the myth making very personal.

Although WWII faded from my mind during the 1980’s – my teenage mind finally progressed to the Cold War and the imminent threat (or so we thought) of nuclear holocaust – there are those who argue that WWII did not end until the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In reality, the world we have all been born into – all us post war babies – has been and still is shaped by the ongoing strifes and struggles that WWII either created or did not amply settle. The guns of WWII might be silent but the rumbles still produce shellshock in the unfortunates around the globe who found the taste of liberation merely a slightly less bitter pill to swallow than occupation.

In my mind, as a boy, 1945 must have been a great year. Celebration. Relief. Freedom. The end of suffering, death, starvation and chaos. The beginning of a better world.

In fact, 1945, even after the capitulation of Germany and Japan, was a horrific bloodbath. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in reprisal and revenge attacks all across Europe and Asia. In some cases the Allies made attempts to keep a lid on it; in others they supplied the means – be it guns or a temporary policy to turn a blind eye. Thousands of German women were raped every day by the Russian Red Army – and this went on until 1947 when the Red Army was eventually confined to barracks. Thousands of POWS and Death Camp survivors died after liberation – not through maltreatment – but through well-meaning ignorance. Soldiers and medical teams would give them food not realizing that a body, in an advanced state of starvation, cannot cope with rich food. Women across Europe who were accused of being “horizontal collaborators” were tarred, feathered, beaten, publically humiliated and in some cases executed. Others, male and female, were accused of collaboration with the fascists, or the communists, or whoever was out of favour that week and executed in almost endless rounds of reprisals as those who perhaps were not as brave as they felt they should have been during the actual conflict crawled out of the woodwork to flex last minute muscles and do their bit for glorious freedom.

And there were, of course, the political betrayals which were ultimately no less bloody. The Cossacks sold back to the Russians, disarmed both martially and emotionally by false promises spouted by the mouthpieces of the West and executed within hours of being loaded onto the trucks. The Koreans who within days of declaring their independence found themselves occupied by the communists in the north and the western powers in the south; years later the entire country would be split into two – an absolute travesty of liberation. And there were the Jews – who nobody wanted and whose true suffering at that point in time nobody bar a precious few really understood – who were still being treated as pariahs.

1945 was bleak.

But humanity did begin to exert itself again. Within days of the cease fires the Allies were mobilizing themselves to save Germany and later Japan from starvation. It was at least understood that the economy of Europe and later the world depended on their survival. Less charitably it was also understood that leaving them to completely collapse would make them ripe pickings for communist ideologies. Because despite the uneasy alliance with Uncle Joe Stalin, the battlefronts for the Cold War were already being drawn up and marked out.

The big idea – the big ideal, in fact – that emerged from the chaos of WWII was the United Nations. A means to prevent such a costly, disastrous war ever happening again. A means to exert and make sacred globally certain human rights and essential freedoms. Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Freedom from want. Freedom from fear. High ideals. But even at the time the Allied powers would only go as far as making these rights a “declaration” and not “a guarantee”. How could they with Korea occupied? The Shinto religion banned in Japan? The communist zone in East Germany already closing like a suffocating fist? National re-education programmes put into place in both Japan and Germany to “civilize the brutes”. And a hundred other nudges, pushes and pressures as the Yanks and the Commies divided up the spoils of war and created the world in which we all currently live.

The modern world then, our world, was borne out of good intentions and unholy hypocrisy. And the guns of its collective war machine, it’s collective peace machine, rumble on and on and on.

Sobering to acknowledge as we take stock of the world around us in 2014, both at home and abroad, that although good intentions can never cancel out hypocrisy, hypocrisy can and does fully cancel out good intentions.

Are those four freedoms really so unobtainable? So unmaintainable? Is it time to admit defeat and present each one of them with a single white feather?

World Wars, it seems, never end but the peace we as individuals make with them sometimes, sadly, does.

Red In Tooth And Claw

To continue the animal theme (my last post was clearly flogging a dead horse) I’d like to impart a small tale to you of feline derring-don’t.

One of our cats, Missy, were she to be human would undoubtedly be a blonde bombshell. She has the feline version of Hollywood good looks and “salon quality hair”. Beautiful markings, well-proportioned and the ability to turn on the charm, she is hot and she knows it. I have no doubt that should the unknowable gods of the cat universe suddenly bestow the curse of humanity upon her she’d make a nice living for herself as a gold digger.

As it is, she is completely pussified for the moment and, due to the soft touch nature of the humans she allows to exist in close proximity to her utter greatness, lives the enviable life of riley.

One of the feline rights she lays claims to is the right to physical elevation.

The implementation of this right entails a fortuitous combination of her inherent ability to leap many times her body length in height and my ability to not move out of range fast enough so that my shoulders provide a convenient, cat sized landing gantry. 

You get the picture I am sure: in a previous life I was a pirate (possibly Black Beard, probably Cap’n Unknown) and Missy was my parrot.

On the whole I put up with the re-appropriation of my shoulders with a good spirit. Having a purring cat nuzzling your face tends to win over even the hardest of hearts.

But. I do draw the line at Missy’s shoulderobics when I am (to quote an old saying of my grandfather) “pointing Percy at the porcelain”. The thought of Missy – ever so surefooted 99% of the time – mistiming her jump and sliding down my frontage, claws out while an intimate part of me is about its work and in her direct line of descent makes me very wary of allowing her onto my shoulders when I am making my intimate water.

So I show her the hand. Literally. I put my palm into her face and directly block off her angle of launch. This has the result that she hovers on the bathroom sink, ears back, looking very peed off while I pee. Normally.

Not so last Saturday.

Last Saturday Missy got tired of “talking to the hand”.

Last Saturday Missy thought “sod it” and launched herself anyway.

Last Saturday Missy somehow managed to bypass my palm, make a failed attempt at entering geostationary orbit and impossibly hook a claw into the inside of my lower lip. Thankfully her purchase had not bitten deep and a split second later saw her disengaged and in freefall to the floor while I cushioned her landing with some robust air-filled expletives.

End result: sulky cat for the rest of the day and me with a cat scratch inside my mouth that had miraculously all but disappeared by teatime (the scratch that is; not my mouth – despite my wife’s fervent wishes to the contrary).

Still, it could have been worse. I could have ended up with a lower lip like Mick Jagger at a gurning contest. Or, worse, no lower lip at all.

And at the end of the day, thanks be to high Heaven, Percy was unmolested. Because that was still the priority, OK?

It’s just like my unmarried Aunt Ethel used to tell me: Percy’s and pussies don’t mix.

And with that sage advice a-ringing in my ears, I shall be keeping the bathroom door very securely locked in future.

Chiliad

It's not that I don't think of my grandparents every day of the year but Christmas seems to bring their presence closer and far more piquantly than at any other season. The effect is both more subtle and more overt.

All my childhood Christmases are tied up inextricably with my grandparents. They were part of the structure and the magic of the day. For me they were the pillars of Christmas. Me and my sisters would get up around 7am - we were amazingly restrained kids - and head downstairs where my parents would have prepared the presents. They were presented in huge plastic bags that featured a huge portrait of Father Christmas on them. Lord knows where my parents had obtained them from. My memory tells me that the bags were enormous - positively cavernous - but logic now tells me I was just very small and my eyes were seeing everything through Christmas-goggles.

Once the presents were all unwrapped we'd have a quick breakfast - all eaten mechanically; who can concentrate on food when you are surrounded by so much Christmas loot? In those days there were no Christmas song compilation CDs or YouTube... in our house it was Radio 1 or nothing and every year the old Christmas favourites would be wheeled out and broadcast, usually by Terry Wogan or Dave Lee Travis. Slade, Wizard, John Lennon and for some reason "The Sun Has Got His Hat On"... not sure why that old war time song was played every Christmas but it was and yet strangely does not feature on any Christmas compilation that I can find.

About 10.30 my granddad, Bampap, would arrive to drive us all up to my Nan's - my sisters and I were allowed to choose one present to take with us (mine was always a Lego set). And that for me was the start of Christmas Day proper. My Nan's house would be strung about with colourful paper decorations and all their cards - hundred of them - would be carefully sellotaped in pleasing patterns on the glass panels of all the doors in the house. The grown-ups would have a quick drink and chat while we kids sat impatiently waiting for the go ahead to play with our presents - like I said, we were amazingly restrained. If we were really lucky Father Christmas would have delivered a few extra presents for us at my Nan's but even if not the best present of all was just knowing we were going to be here for the next 2 days.

Just after 11am all the grown-ups - barring my Nan - would head off down the pub. My Nan would stay behind to cook the Christmas meal and look after me and my sisters. My memories of this time are very happy: the whole day still ahead of us, a new Lego set to build and lots of jolly, friendly programmes on the TV and my Nan in her absolute element. Her time at the pub would come on Boxing Day when my parents would stay behind and look after us but Christmas Day itself was just us kids and Nan and the gradually deepening aromas of chicken and turkey being slowly roasted.

As I got older I began to get curious about "the pub" - what happened there, what they did - and indeed as I got older I soon got to the age where the Lego dried up and we were allowed to join the grown-ups at the pub. I won't lie; it was a disappointment. I've never been a pub person and although it was jolly and fun it was never Christmas in the way it was in those early years when it was just us and Nan and Christmas telly in her cosy front room.

The afternoon was usually a blur. The arrival of the Christmas meal seemed to take the brakes off the day and the afternoon and evening would always career away from me much too fast. We'd eat. Watch the Christmas film. My parents would both falls asleep on the sofa much to my Auntie Linda's mirth. We'd have a light tea and then Bampap would drive us home again, Christmas sadly, grievously over for another year. The only consolation was coming back to my Nan's again for Boxing Day.

I hope Karen and I give something of this type of Christmas to our boys. It's difficult. My Nan and Bampap knew so many people my sisters and I were overloaded with "aunts" and "uncles". My boys have precious few so Karen and I work hard to pick up the shortfall. Those Christmases of my childhood are long gone. They live only in my heart and head in pictures and sounds and smells that I cannot, with all the longing in the world, impart to my children. I just hope the pictures and sounds they are imbibing in these years will stand them in as good stead as my own and they will remember their childhood Christmases as lovingly as I remember mine.

And I hope you will remember yours that way too, both Christmases past and all Christmases to come.

May you all have a very Merry Christmas and a very happy New Year.

As a side-note you might like to know that this, dear readers, is my 1000th post.

Halo

So Prince Harry’s in trouble again.

He kept his butt-cheeks under wraps but was a might loose with an insensitive tongue. I haven’t read any of the offended write-ups or seen any of the worthy TV interviews with the usual round of for-hire-experts. I’ve caught a few newspaper headlines, caught the odd sound-bite and therefore deem myself as well equipped to offer an opinion as any UK tabloid journalist (with the advantage that I won’t hack your mobile phone – Lord knows I can barely get into my own).

From what I can glean Harry’s been taken to task for talking about how he, along with his army chums, have taken a few Taliban fighters “out of the game” and even compared the action he’d seen to playing video games.

Right-on righteous people the world over are up in arms (ironic) over his gross insensitivity and callous, off-hand dismissal of taking another human being’s life.

And they’re right. Of course they are. I can remember feeling outraged at hearing stories of American helicopter crews listening to loud rock music as they shot at insurgents and again, made comparisons to playing computer games. It was as if they were treating modern warfare as some kind of leisure pursuit which totally devalued human life until the people they were fighting impinged on their consciences no more than a pixellated sprite on a computer screen.

That is plainly wrong. Dreadfully wrong.

But who is at fault here?

Let’s look at it another way. We train our armed forces to do many different tasks – but no matter how you dress these tasks up politically, they are trained to kill. Their goal is always to kill more of the enemy than the enemy kills of them. They are trained to do it without thinking. Without breaking down and needing counselling five minutes into a fire fight or even five weeks. As horrible as it sounds conscience doesn’t come into it. And yes it is desensitizing. I imagine when you’re in a battle zone the last thing you want is to be feeling a bit sensitive. You would not be able to function and as such would be liable to get yourself and your colleagues killed.

We expect our soldiers to go out and kill. To kill with honour, yes. To kill “viable targets” (what a horrid expression), yes. To not kill children or innocents. To not kill for pleasure or needlessly. But ultimately, when the need calls for it, to kill. It’s a big part of soldiering in the modern world, alas.

I daresay the soul searching, the emotional breakdowns and psychological payback comes later. But at the time, when you’re in the theatre of war, you keep all that touchy-feely stuff as far away from you as possible and by using whatever means necessary.

That’s what I imagine Prince Harry is doing.

And then we have the video game thing. Heaven knows I have complained myself about computer games which purport to replicate the “real war experience”. My granddad fought in WWII, I don’t imagine he’d have thought much of his experiences being the basis for a living room based computer game which involves the participant sitting on their backside twiddling a few buttons on a handheld controller and staring at a TV screen.

But these games are out there and proliferating in huge numbers. Our kids, siblings, partners are playing them. They play them for entertainment. They play them for fun. The realism element is a selling point, a way of benchmarking the quality of the game.

This is highly questionable.

This desensitizes us all. Cheapens us all.

As a society we condemn warfare while at the same time making it a significant element of most of our entertainment choices – computer games, movies, literature. It has become enmeshed with fashion, rock music soundtracks and the way we gauge our own status.

Not all of us, I know. But enough that in any high street in any town you can go into a Game store (for example) and immerse yourself in the war of your choice.

Who is at fault here? The individual soldier or the society that equates war with play and then sends that soldier out to play for real?

Just think for a minute of all those people who help design and create those ultra-realistic computer war games... how much blood is on their hands?

Real, not salaciously imagined.

Just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

I Believed In Father Christmas

I can’t remember the exact age I was when I stopped believing in Father Christmas. About 6 or 7 maybe. By modern standards that’s possibly a good innings.

I do know that nobody told me. Nobody let the cat out of the bag or suddenly decided that I needed to “man up” about Christmas.

I worked it out. A slow dawning realization that the logistics, the physics... they just didn’t add up. My parents didn’t help by declaring certain cupboards off limits during the run up to Christmas. That aroused my suspicions. Plus relatives got sloppy about bringing presents to the house. They did it in full view of us. When you’re a kid you remember even the smallest glimpse of wrapping paper. When Christmas morning arrived and that same paper appeared again... well, 2 add 2 inevitably makes 4.

I remember feeling gutted. An excoriating disappointment that left me completely deflated and flat. The world seemed greyer, drabber and smaller once the truth was upon me. No magic. No flying sleigh. No Father Christmas coming down the chimney. No toy factory at the North Pole with a happy workforce of elves making toys.

Just mum and dad. Just Nan and Bampap. Just Auntie Edie and Uncle Harry. Auntie Maude. Auntie June and Uncle Bill. And all the rest.

It is only now that I can look back and see that there was magic in the truth after all. All those aunts and uncles. My grandparents. All those jolly smiles – the jollier I suspect for having lived through WWII and thereafter counting their blessings for being alive every single day.

Mum and dad thankfully excepted, all those names that meant so much to me are now all gone from the world. Dead. Vanished. I have memories of their voices that I cannot pass onto my own kids.

Instead, we have Father Christmas still. And though my 11 year old sussed it out some years ago we persist in the ruse for the sake of my 5 year old. I think that small temporary belief in magic is the most precious gift of all. It creates, if nothing else, a capacity to find and cherish the real magic of life when you’re older... for all you have to battle through that initial disappointment. Sometimes lies and sham merely disguise other truths.

I do remember one year though, when I was about 25. It was Christmas Eve and I’d come back home late from a mate’s house. I hadn’t drunk too much; just enough to be warm and merry. I tucked myself into bed – it had gone midnight so technically was already Christmas Day. I remember wishing the world a very Merry Christmas as I settled down to go to sleep.

And I heard – just once – the sound of sleigh bells. Very distinctive. Very clear. Somewhere close in the crisp midnight air.

I know, I know. Some drunk marlarkying about on his way home. Or some parent going the extra mile for his/her kids.

A logical explanation is out there somewhere, I am sure, and probably not very hard to find.

But just for a second... I did wonder.

And every year since... just for a second... I still do.

Funny thing, magic.

Merry Christmas to you all.

The Maltings

Modern suburban bliss.

That’s what this photograph conjures up.

But lying beneath that idea, for me, is a whole heap of childhood memories.

The building above form a residential development in Leamington Spa called The Maltings. It takes its name – and indeed much of its design aesthetic – from the buildings that were there originally.

When this site was first developed the buildings formed a local brewery – we’re talking some time in the 1800s here. Back when I knew the site in the 1970’s the brewery had closed down and I think the site was somehow shared between the local authority and Severn Trent Water. Certainly Severn Trent used to park their fleet of vans in the car park alongside those of the council bin men.

My grandfather worked for Severn Trent for much of his working life. Hence the connection.

Sunday’s were my favourite day as a kid. Every Sunday me and my sisters would spend the day with my grandparents – my Nan and Bampap. Bampap would pick us up around 10.30 and the journey we’d take to my grandparent’s house was painfully, joyously circuitous. We’d call in on family friends first – a whole host of people who became adopted as Aunty This and Uncle That. My grandparents came from the generation where friends were people you actually made time to see and visit rather than just poke on Facebook. They are each memories in themselves.

Regularly though we’d call in on the site now known as The Maltings.

Due to the Severn Trent connection my grandfather had access to the place and the facilities (such as they were – this was the 1970’s after all). This consisted solely of a standpipe and a hose with which he’d wash his car for free while me and my sister (my youngest sister was yet to be born) sat in the car and giggled at the sound of the water hitting the metal roof and running in curving arcs down the windscreen. On occasion, Bampap would allow us out of the car and we’d go for a nose around the offices. All strictly covert and secret. He’d tell us not to touch anything and then slyly nick us notepads and pencils from the stationery cupboard or dial the speaking clock on the telephone so we could hear the time recited to us in clipped BBC English.

I remember once he left us in the car while he went off about some business or other. He wouldn’t be long he said, we were to wait in the car. I daresay he was gone barely 15 minutes but to me and my sister, at 8 and 7 years old, it seemed an age and we began to panic that he wasn’t coming back. An idea that seems so ridiculous to me now I can’t believe I ever thought it. Being the oldest it was up to me to act and I decided we ought to roll down the window and climb out and go look for him.

Having made the decision I then sat back whilst my sister acted and I have a fuzzy memory of her managing to squeeze out of the driver’s side-window and dropping down to the ground just as Bampap appeared asking us at the top of his voice what the hell we were doing? I remember I was relieved to see him, not least because I doubted I’d be as agile as my sister and would not have got out of the window safely.

My other memories of this time are fragmentary. Reflections in a broken mirror. I remember the vans that used to be parked there. I remember the clock tower on the old brewery building. I remember the feral cats that we’d sometimes see scampering about and that Bampap would try and entice towards him by rubbing his fingers together as if to proffer food.

An entire decade of Sunday mornings are reduced down to a few mental snapshots and disembodied feelings that I know would hold me tightly if only I could bring them more into the light.

The Maltings development is lovely. I’m sure it is a very nice place to live and there are plaques commemorating the site’s former usage as a brewery – all part of Leamington’s rich history.

But when I walk by now I can’t help but feel a wistful sort of regret. Regret and sadness.

All that meant anything to me about the place is gone. Long gone.

And the plaque I have in my mind is now not as clear as it once was.

As my Nan would have said: happy days.

Class

The way it was always told to me, not long after Chamberlain had declared war on Germany, my grandfather – barely 19 years of age – had hotfooted it around to the RAF recruiting office to sign up. He no doubt fancied himself kitted out with one of those stiffened scarves and leather goggles and chewing on a choice cigar from the comfort of his cockpit as he strafed a few Heinkels with a careless flick of his thumb on the joystick.

And who wouldn’t? The RAF, even before the Battle of Britain, had an air of the glams about it. I mean, dash it all, but those chaps were just plain dashing. Why yomp across France when you can sit at the controls of possibly the best plane ever built and let a Rolls-Royce Merlin carry you all the way to the theatre of battle in style?

But the RAF didn’t want my grandfather. They told him in no uncertain terms that he didn’t have the brains to be a spitfire pilot or any other kind of pilot. He wasn’t made of the right stuff, see. He wasn’t educated properly. He’d made it through a decent enough school but he was indelibly working class. As far as the RAF were concerned he was a yomper if ever there was one. They no doubt looked at him through their steely monocles and muttered under their breaths, “Not one of us.”

And so despite, the urgent country-wide call to arms, the RAF declined my grandfather’s enthusiastic offer and the legend of The Leamington Baron was shot down before it even got off the runway.

If my grandfather was ever embittered by this show of classism he never showed it. He was resilient and perhaps just plain pragmatic enough to depart the RAF recruiting office with a cheery wave and an “Okay gov’nor” and hop over the threshold of the recruiting office immediately next door and find himself signed up by the Royal Navy. They snatched his hand off and had him rated as able-bodied before you could say “hard to starboard”.

He loved his time in the Navy. He loved the travel. He loved the camaraderie. Not that he was blinded by his love – he didn’t like the torpedoes, or the magnetic mines or the time his ship had its stern completely blown off and they had to rely on luck and the skill of their captain to limp them miraculously to the dicey safety of a Maltase port – but I can see from his war photos that the Navy changed him. It broadened his outlook. It completed his education in a way that a stint with the RAF would never have done. So he was never a member of a gentleman’s club or got a nickname like “Squiffy” or “Ack-Ack”... but he got to see India, North and South Africa, Malta, Iceland, even a few Russian ports.

He saw parts of the world that a boy from the working class slums of Leamington Spa would not ordinarily have got to see. And though the officers on board ship were just as high born as those of the RAF there was a closeness and equality (of sorts) born of spending months and months together in the equivalent of a tin can with no other company than the burly chaps around you. The respect that was engendered went both ways. In that respect war is a great leveller.

If it wasn’t for my Nan’s reluctance to travel I have no doubt my grandfather would have left these shores far behind him after the war and I’d be writing to you from South Africa. My grandfather loved his shore leave there and often spoke fondly of it in the years before his death in 2009. Not that he particularly regretted staying put in Blighty – he and my Nan gadded about quite a bit during their retirement years and saw as much of the world as they could – but I’m sure he occasionally dreamed of what could have been; if things had been different.

For all that though my grandfather did well for himself after the war. Yes, he did manual work but he was well paid for it. He aspired to be comfortable and he achieved it. He ended up owning his own house and car and was as far removed from those childhood slums as it was realistic to expect to be.

At the end he could have looked those RAF officers in the eye and got a polite nod in return. He’d earnt his wings.

The first casualty of war might be innocence but one of the last was class.

A Silly Christmas Wish

If you could go back in time which period would you choose?

It’s a pub question really. I’ve been asked it many times in my life and it’s always sparked off pleasant debate between friends.

In the past I think I’ve come up with all the obvious answers: Bethlehem around 0 AD, Avalon sometime in the Dark Ages, a safe distance from Pompeii in 79 AD... I’m sure we could all pick a historical time-frame that interests us on a personal level.

Since the death of my grandfather last Christmas – the last of my much loved grandparents – more and more I have found myself wishing I could leap back in time a far more modest amount of years. I find I am drawn far more than I used to be to World War II documentaries on television. Not out of any vicarious battle lust or schoolboy interest in fighter planes and war ships... but because the period is vividly associated in my mind with my Nan and Bampap (as we called them). It was a time when they were young adults and although they’d known each other a long time at this point their romance was only in its infancy.

I have old photographs of them taken in the 1940’s. They look both like and unlike the Nan and Bampap that I came to know and love after my birth in 1969. I find myself wondering what kind of people they were at this early and traumatic period in their lives. The world at war. Their hearts full of thoughts and hopes for themselves and their families – families I was 30 years away from being part of.

I would like to look upon them in colour – rather than the old black and white / sepia prints that I have in my possession. Would I speak to them? I don’t know. What could I say? Tell them I love them; who I am? I think in reality that would be impossible to do. So bittersweet. Sometimes I imagine myself catching up with my granddad during the war... pulling him to the ground as bullets strafe overhead; giving him a knowing look as he thanked me. A silly and embarrassing fantasy.

And then I would like to come forward in time a little bit. To Christmas sometime in the mid to late 70’s. Back when I was a kid and me and my 2 sisters, my mum and my dad would spend every Christmas and Boxing Day at my Nan’s house immersed in the effortlessly warm and joyous festivities that they seemed to weave around them every year. They were a big part of my childhood and teen Christmases. Inseparable in fact. I cannot approach a Christmas now without thinking of them and remembering all those Christmases gone by.

I wish I could see them again during this time. See myself with them. See myself with my whole family all around me. I would like to whisper invisibly into my own young ear... “Cherish this, cherish this...”

This Christmas, in lieu of travelling back through time, I shall take a few moments during the mad Christmas hubbub to sit quietly with my wife and my boys and I shall cherish it with all my heart.

I do hope you all do the same with those closest to you.

Have a very merry Christmas. I wish you all the very best for 2011. Thank you all for reading this year.

Pride

I haven’t been to a Remembrance Day service for donkey’s years.

It is something I am uncomfortable admitting to because I can’t quite pinpoint why that should be. I used to go every year with my granddad and was very proud to do so. We would take a place among the crowds as close to the Town Hall as possible as this was where the companies from the various armed forces would be on parade and would begin the march through the main street.

Naturally I only had a child’s understanding of what the parade meant. I knew what soldiers were and what soldiers did. I knew that my granddad had been in the navy during WWII and that he was quietly proud of it. I was proud of him. And yet I never questioned his decision not to take his place with the veterans who would also march in the parade.

Year after year these old boys would march past us, their medals making rainbow lines on their jackets, and a few of my granddad’s pals would hail him as they marched by. “Hey, Stan, why aren’t you taking your place here?”, “You gonna join us next year, Stan?”

He would just smile, acknowledge them with a quick word or shout that he was fine where he was. I recall him moaning one year that he wouldn’t join the parade because he felt the government had let the old veterans down with their policies – I don’t think it matters which year it was or which government. I think that sense of being let down, of promises not being kept was constant. Looking back now though I think his real reason for not joining the parade was a sense of modesty. Although he was proud of his service he felt he’d done nothing special. And his pride was tinged with sadness always for those young boys, his mates, who never came home again.

He had his campaign medals and spoke of them often but they were rarely seen. I think I only saw them twice in the whole of my childhood. They were kept still in the envelope that they’d been posted to him in. And that envelope was kept in a Huntley & Palmer's biscuit tin. The tin and its contents are now in my possession and are in the same state that they’ve been in for the last 60 years. The medals in the envelope, alongside his demob papers and his ship service record, all safe inside the biscuit tin.

Though my understanding of Remembrance Day was basic I do recall feeling very emotional as a child – especially when the Last Post was sounded and the silence began. I can remember one year feeling quite on the edge of tears but holding it back lest I shame my grandfather by blubbing like a baby. Looking back now, I doubt such an act would have shamed him. I’m not sure why it made me so emotional. Something about the meaning of the event touched me, I guess, in a way that didn’t need a man’s understanding of war to confirm that, actually, my reaction was the right one.

And then one year we didn’t go. I think he’d reached the age where standing up in the cold for any length of time was just beyond him. He could watch the service on the TV in the comfort of his rocking chair and attend the same service as the Queen. No contest. I wish I’d voiced my disappointment but for some reason didn’t. I didn’t want to put him under pressure, I suppose, and I felt he had more of a rightful say about Remembrance Day than I did.

Even now it amazes me why I just didn’t show a bit of spark and go myself. But there you go that’s me all over. And now, each year, it catches me out. It seems to have dropped off my radar. I solemnly and without fail obey the 2 minutes silence on the 11th but the parade passes me by. Always afterwards, too late, I think to myself: I should take the boys along... I really must make a point of doing it next year.

But the real reason I don’t go, I suspect, is because part of me will be looking out for my granddad. Not in the parade itself - for he was never there - but in the crowds of on-lookers and knowing, with a deep, deep regret, that he is not there, not now, nor will ever be. And his old war mates cannot call to him any longer nor he answer.

I hope it is not just me who remembers him.

Brown Bread

The life of yours truly should have come to an abrupt end last Sunday at approximately 3.37 in the afternoon.

I was, as you might have guessed, doing a form of DIY (the single biggest killer of the average male in the UK after cancer, stress and marriage. I am, of course, joking regarding the latter – a woman doesn’t have to be married to a man to be able to kill him). I was doing the gardening.

For once it wasn’t a lawn mower based accident. With a little ‘un running around I’ve become very OCD about always unplugging the mower before I empty it or even leave it untended for the smallest amount of time.

On this occasion the agent of my destruction was the hedge trimmer. A nasty biting brute of a device that lays our front hedge low with the slightest of touch. I’d unwound the cable. I’d plugged it into the extension lead. All seemed good to go.

I pulled the trigger.

And if the world had been any different – if human technological advances hadn’t brought into being such things as fuses and trip switches – my life would have been over at this point. I’d’ve been a goner. I’d’ve been, to quote my old granddad, brown bread. And you wouldn’t be having to read this ‘ere blog post right now – a fact, I’m sure, which will have many of you lamenting the safety features on the average electrical plug.

The cable you see had, unbeknownst to me (because I was tired / daydreaming and didn’t check it properly), become interwoven in the moving teeth of the trimmer.

As soon as I turned it on the trimmer severed the source to its own power. A single spark – like a dud firework – leapt forward and fizzled out before it hit the pavement. This was the first I knew of my death. I say death because I’m sure that in a parallel universe somewhere funeral arrangements are even now being arranged for a full state burial and my wife is celebrating gymnastically with the milkman.

Bizarrely, this close encounter with t’other side didn’t hit home until much later. My first reaction was to run cap in hand to my wife and apologize for coking the trimmer at a time when we can’t afford a new dibbler let alone a hefty new electrical gardening gadget. I’d also tripped the main electricity supply to the house and my youngest son was complaining vociferously that Woody and Buzz Lightyear had rudely vacated their usual slot on the TV screen.

In the panic of trying to find the distribution board and right these myriad wrongs by restoring the appropriate switch my missed appointment with St Peter completely slipped my mind. Life went on as normal. Life indeed went on.

It is only now, days later, that I realize how lucky I had been. How lucky and how foolish.

How easily and unthinkingly we go about our daily business blasé and nonchalant to the many potential death traps that litter our modern world!

My humble thanks go to all those boffins who over the years have contributed to the safety mechanisms of the common-or-garden house plug. My thanks go also to whatever deity decided to give my miserable soul a second chance. And my biggest thanks go to you, dear reader, for the bouquets of flowers you would have undoubtedly sent, the donations to my favourite charities and the selfless acts of throwing your mini-skirted selves (and that includes the guys) down onto my coffin as it is lowered into the damp earth and your wails and protests that there simply wasn’t the time to ravish me one more time.

‘Cos on the bright side, folks, there still is.

See. All’s well that ends well.

Bampap

I don’t think the name Bampap is one that is used universally. In fact I’m pretty sure it was created and remained within the confines of my family. My mother, as a toddler, referred to her grandfather as “Bampap” – a young child’s attempt to say “granddad” perhaps – and the name kind of stuck. When I and my sisters were born 20 years later the title was passed onto us as if it were the norm. So our granddad, my mother’s father, was always known as Bampap. Not being a particularly observant child it was years before I realized that other families didn’t have a Bampap.

You may disagree but I think that they missed out.

This first photo was taken in 1942. The place is obvious. My granddad – Bampap – and his mates are plainly on shore leave, a few precious days on land before returning to sea and the war. In the years before he died Bampap spoke almost wistfully of his war years. His memories of Cairo seemed to revolve around the street names where all the best whorehouses were and the advice given to all the men by the ship’s doctor. If you’ve been with one of the girls go and see a one of the city doctors before you come back to the ship – their medical supplies were extremely limited and if you came on board with the clap you were liable to be stuck with it for months until you struck land again.

He never said if he’d indulged and I didn’t ask. It wouldn’t have been the gentlemanly thing to do.

I apologize for the quality of the photo – but, hey, it is over 50 years old and the camera would have been rough and ready. Here is a blown up shot of my granddad. He’s the guy in the middle with the fabulous nose. He kept that nose and that body shape for all of his life. Always remaining trim and with a beak that somehow didn’t mar his looks.

Years later in 1999 I made my own journey to Egypt and here is a photo of me standing in roughly the same place as my granddad over 50 years later. I don’t cut a dash in the same way, do I? I’m thankful that he was able to see this photo before macular degeneration robbed him of 90% of his eyesight a few years later.

My one regret is not writing down the names of Bampap’s war mates. He had many and there are lots of photos of them. Photos of young boys who look cheery, chirpy and cheeky despite being in the middle of a war. If you believe the mood of the photos they are on holiday; a foreign cruise; out on the pull. That so wasn’t the case. I think my granddad was the only one of his little group who made it home again. I once made the comment that I bet he knew who his mates were in those tough times. He only nodded and said “yes, and I lost them all.” There’s not much you can say to that.

This last photo was taken in 1975. And yes, the boy in the picture with the NHS glasses is me. The girl is my oldest sister. I have no idea where this photo was taken or by whom. It can’t have been my Nan because our heads are all in shot. She’d have cut them off or else chopped off our feet instead.

This is how I like to remember him. The sharp beak which protruded from eyes that were always mischievous and kind. The smart blazer with the naval insignia he was so proud of sewn onto the breast pocket. The awkward love and protectiveness that he always exuded.

His presence always made us feel safe as kids. I think that comes over in the photo. Wherever we are, we’re more than happy to be there.

He’d have been 90 today.

Stalking

I fear that unless I summon up and exert all of my will power I am in danger of becoming a stalker.

Not for me the telescope through my neighbour’s curtains to catch a glimpse of her camisoles (why go to that expense when I can see her knickers on the washing line every day? Note to self: probably better to edit that line out later). Not for me the surreptitious car chases or, coat collar up, following someone to and from their place of work on foot, hoping to catch a glimpse of a shady décolletage.

No. I’m stalking a house. A red cube of bricks and mortar.

I couldn’t resist walking by my grandparent’s house yesterday lunchtime. Although, of course, it is not really their house any longer. A new car had parked itself on the drive. Dark green. Unkempt looking. With horribly filthy hubcaps. My grandfather would never have allowed that.

It hurt. This I freely admit. It hurt seeing signs of other lives going about their business inside those walls. It hurt realizing that I can no longer go inside a house where I was, without fail, always, always welcome. I found myself craning my neck to see through the net curtains (still my Nan’s), noting that no furniture had yet been moved inside, that the bird muck on the patio windows was still there and visible via the light bleeding through from the back garden.

I did two walk-bys feeling furtive and fugitive. I caught a glimpse of the back garden fence – the boundary that, when blowing bubbles as kids, my sisters and I would delight in sending our little soapy missives over. Amongst the hundreds of photos rescued from my Nan’s possessions is one of me in a yellow romper suit, barely 12 months old, being held by my Nan on the back lawn.

I have stood on that very spot a few times in the lead up to the sale of the house marvelling sadly at how fast, how coldly time seems to fly by.

I’m steeling myself to stay away for a while. To try and come to terms with it all emotionally – and I am sorry to be going on about it yet again here (how boring for you all) but I am shocked at how difficult I am finding this new reality.

It feels wrong. For as long as I have been alive that house has been my Nan’s. I’m pretty sure they were the first people to move into it and in my mind it is forever associated with her and my granddad. It feels like a huge chunk has been bitten out of the world. Or I suppose a better analogy is that of an amputated limb. I know it’s not there anymore but I can still feel it.

In a bizarre kind of way I feel suddenly shut out of my childhood.

The one positive from all this emotional upheaval is the sheer number of memories that have come flooding back to me. Helped along by the mass scanning project I have now begun to back-up all my Nan’s old photographs, I have remembered things I had completely forgotten I remembered (if you see what I mean). I will no doubt record some of them here over the coming months to save them from falling into the abyss of my mind once more.

In the meantime, please bear with me people. I’m going to put my binoculars away. I’m going to shred my little notepad of comings and goings. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Wayne’s World

I had to make an emergency dash to my grandfather’s house on Monday to rescue the old hunting horn that hung over the stairs from the hands of the house clearance people – not that my grandfather ever hunted or particularly blew the horn except on Christmas morning to annoy my Nan (which is another story for another time). The horn always reminds me of my granddad and always makes me smile. There was no way it was going to be consigned to the black hole of the auctioneer’s warehouse.

The house clearance people had been primed of my imminent arrival and had set the horn aside for me. I imagined that going into the partly eviscerated house would be painful and shocking. And in a way it was. The banging about upstairs by strangers. The boxes being carted outside to the van. The furniture moved and strewn around the sitting room ready for removal. But they had put my granddad’s old radio on and the noise – any noise at all in fact in a house that has been horribly quiet for 6 months – was comforting. And somehow right. It made me feel better about someone new moving in.

But this isn’t why I am writing. The visit was still emotional. Still upsetting. Another acknowledgment in a whole line of unwanted acknowledgements that the time is nearing (is already here in fact at the time of writing) when I will no longer have access to this much loved house. So I was rather mournful as I meandered home again. But having time to myself was what I needed. A bit of head space. A bit of heart space.

As I neared home all I wanted to do was get inside, shut the door and have a quiet moment or two.

However, when I reached the house my way was barred. Wayne, our friendly neighbourhood window cleaner had his ladder propped up over the front door and was cleaning the window above. I briefly thought about walking around the block until he was done – I really didn’t want to talk to anyone – but in the end I decided that I was just being silly. A quick nod and a hello and I’d be in. I could even pay him on the spot and save him having to call round and disturb my evening meal later. So I approached the house.

As I did so Wayne spotted the horn and, quite naturally I guess, asked if I did much hunting. I explained the situation and by way of explaining revealed that my grandfather had died 6 months ago – the last of my grandparents.

Did I believe in God, Wayne asked.

Hmm. I should have picked up on the warning signs here but instead answered truthfully – I was no longer sure.

Over the next 20 minutes, ignoring my obvious distress and desire to get away (how loudly do I have to jangle my front door keys for God’s sake?) Wayne, our window cleaner, did his best to proselytize me into his own personal religio-political worldview.

Did I know that the laws of the West are based on Canonical Law? The Ten Commandments? Did I know that the West was falling? Falling not to Islamic Fundamentalism but to... (and here’s one from the back of the closet) communism? It has been creeping in for decades. The powers that be know about it but are lying to us about it. Because they are not really in control. The true leaders are hidden and secret.

Alarm bells were really ringing now but I could not escape. Even though mentally I was swearing at this man to shut the eff up and go away all I could manage were monosyllabic replies and grunts, still in emotional shock I suppose, desperately trying to inch my way to the front door that was held prisoner beneath his ladder.

And then came the biggy. The national deficit. The global financial collapse. He explained that all this had come about because originally the idea of loaning money at a set and reasonable rate of interest had been laid down in the Old Testament – but all this was now being ignored. The interest rates were now designed to take more and more money from people, designed so that nobody would ever be able to pay it all back again. It was designed to keep us all servile and malleable. And the bankers... the bankers... they were all... Satanists. He looked me in the eye as he said this and nodded sagely. Yep, he said. Satanists. He genuinely believed that.

Great, I thought. A religious nut is coming to my house every month to clean my freaking windows. And he had seemed such a nice guy before all of this.

In the end I made some jokey closing comment that grated upon my own tongue and lunged for the front door. I got the key into the lock and turned it. Phew! I had made it. Wayne, however, was unrepentant (well, he has no need to be I guess) and was still going on and on... I’d be OK, he said. I’d be fine because I was on the right path. The path my grandparents had laid down for me... Blah blah blah.

I shut the door and fumed.

How dare he? He doesn’t know anything about me and certainly knows nothing at all about my grandparents. Both were Christian but neither forced any kind of religion down my or my sisters' throats. Their religion was a very personal thing – as indeed all religion should be.

The whole encounter left a bad taste in my mouth and I am still angry about it. Outraged in fact. Did Wayne really think he was spreading “the good word”, “the good news”? What an awful ragbag of pub lounge paranoia and twisted up personal bigotries. I’d arrived home feeling vulnerable and had been trampled on by someone who’s only interest was to try and recruit me into an ugly, ignorant doctrine of their own making and score some kind of self esteem point.

Far from helping me find my religion again it made me want to turn my back on all of them and keep walking.

What a git.

If eyes are the windows to the soul, I want Wayne nowhere near mine.

The Last To Go

I’m possibly being overly sentiment (and sentimentality is never a good thing) but today is the day my grandparent’s house is laid to rest (killed is too strong a word).

The house clearance people – a local firm of auctioneers – are already at work, possibly even finished by the time you read this, clearing out the furniture, the cupboard junk, the knick-knacks, the physical manifestations of over 60 years and at least 4 generations of family life.

All of it – the dishes we used at Christmas, the old ice cream tubs full of pencils and their smell of graphite, the suitcases of old knitting magazines that my Nan used to collect – will be loaded up into a van and transported off to some side street depot where the wheat will be sorted from the chaff. The good stuff will be put up for auction, the non-saleable stuff... well, God knows. Do they bin it? Recycle it? EBay it? I’d hate to think of my Nan’s old pots and pans taking up space in some landfill somewhere – her Wednesday beef stews were amazing. Those pots and pans should be on a pedestal somewhere. Alas, I have neither the room for them nor the pedestal.

So it’s time to let them go. Let it all go. I have said my goodbyes. I have saved what I can. But the bulk of it – the collected sum of all that makes up my Nan’s home – cannot be kept.

I think what I shall miss most is the smell of the house. The smell of each room. My Nan was a great one for putting a bar of Palmolive soap in every drawer so that all her clothes would smell nice. Those bars were still in the drawers last time I looked. And when I stood over them, closed my eyes and inhaled, it was as if I could almost smell the lives of the people that once lived there – my own life intricately and intimately bound up with them.

The house is like a member of the family to me. It has a personality and a place in my memory as beloved and special as those that are inhabited by my Nan, my granddad (or Bampap as we called him) and my Auntie Linda (not that we’d ever dare call her “auntie”) who all lived within its walls. All are dead now. All are gone. The last 5 years took all three of them. Only the house remains. A sad old friend. Its memory failing, its ear straining desperately for the key in the lock that will announce that its former owner’s are returning but finding always only silence.

The front door will never be opened by anyone from my family now. My family's 60 year and my 40 year association with the house is over.

The last few times I have been there have been bittersweet. The comfort of the familiar undercut by the sharp sorrow of the small but quiet emptiness that has settled over the entire house. I have felt like a ghost, felt like I have been haunting the house because my grandparents are not. A troubled ghost walking old rooms and staring fondly at old aspects hoping that they will never change.

Those hopes were always going to be futile. Change has come. On Wednesday the contract with the new owners will undergo “completion”. My Nan’s house with its horde of treasures that so fascinated me as a child will be dead forever. The last of them to go.

But unlike them it will undergo some sort of instant reincarnation. A new family will move in. Will put down new carpets. Put up new curtains and wallpaper. Will bring their own sounds and smells of life.

My ghost will haunt there no longer.

It will return to life. A new day. A new tomorrow, holding much loved yesterdays to its heart.

Is sentimentality such a bad thing? I hope not.

Goodbye old friend.