Still at it

It’s the time for remembrance. 90 years since the end of the first war – The Great War as my grandparents and great aunts called it. And they had been through it. I watched the remembrance service and it becomes more poignant each year. The story of the mother and sister of a 20 year old soldier, dead in Afghanistan haunts me. My own sons are of the same age as the youngsters dying there and in Iraq. I found it unbearably sad when she told of the visit from the police and army officer – “please tell me it isn’t Joe.”

My father was a prisoner of war having been picked up by a German patrol in the Libyan desert where he and his navigator had spent days after they were shot down. He was transported up through Alabania and eventually to Stalag Luft VIIB prison camp. That was in 1942 – he had been too young to join up at the start. He spent his 21st birthday shackled to the next prisoner on their way to Silesia. His cards home to his great aunt, censored of course, arrived each month and each says mostly the same thing – “we are pretty A1 here”, “we are getting on well” and always, always, “I expect to be home soon”, “not long now”. All through ’42, ’43 and ’44 – the last card I have was sent in December ‘44. Shortly afterwards he was part of a famous death march out of the camp when many of his friends died. He told my brothers and I of the pathetic effort to take everything they had and he gave us the mental picture of his saxophone lying in the snow when he jettisoned anything which wasn’t absolutely necessary.

On Maundy Thursday 1945, aged 23 he closed his eyes in the camp where they had marched to. Wracked with dysentery he knew he would die and thought only that he would have liked to see his parents and aunt and uncle again and he would have liked to have studied medicine. Oh well.

On Good Friday the Americans arrived, hosed them down, put him and others onto the hospital trains and sent him home to spend 8 months in hospital. He was discharged just before Christmas to go home to his uncomprehending parents in Croydon. On Christmas afternoon he went into bleak, bombed Croydon centre and came across two German prisoners of war waiting for repatriation. He took them home for tea because, as he explained, they were the only people he had met that would really understand what he felt. He left that example, he and my mother employed a German au-pair for us children less than 10 years after the war and he told us “never, ever, forget that what happened in Germany could happen here if we aren’t vigilant.”

Oh, and he did study medicine too.