Remembrance
I get more than a little jumpy writing things about stuff like this, because I am far from knowledgable and, as someone who is almost always against the wars that ‘we’ have fought recently, it can seem a bit rich to me, writing about the people who fought in them.
My Granddad was a marine in WWII though. He drove a landing craft in the D-Day landings, he pitched up in Singapore and Madagascar, fought in the Pacific and, erm… I don’t know much else to be honest, because he doesn’t really talk about it.
He’ll tell us funny stories when they occur to him, and it’s not like he avoids the topic, but I’ve never heard him tell any kind of tale about the war which I would describe as all that harrowing. It’s possible that he’d rather not bring it up because the memories are a little hard to face, but I suspect it might be because, for all we would listen attentively, we actually would not be able to truly understand what the tales he would be telling actually, deep down, mean to him.
The world moves incredibly fast. The things my Granddad does tell us which do make an impact are the tales of living in Wales and Manchester immediately before and after the war. He talks about trying to get fired by his foreman at the steelworks just to prove he could face the man down. He talks about his brother fighting their father, and running off with him to fend for themselves and make a living whilst he was in his early teens. He talks about how he and my Grandma tried to keep the house warm, and how he would steal coal from work to put on the fire in the evening.
It’s difficult enough to know what the people who fight in modern wars really experience, despite some excellent films which try and get it across, but as much as anything when I think about my Granddad and his role in the Second World War and in particular the combination of that war and the society in which he lived at the time, it really strikes me that increasingly no-one understands what these guys went through, not properly. Apart from a desire to fight Germans, one of the reasons he was so keen to get into the forces, in whatever division, was because working in the steelworks in Manchester was so incredibly shit.
The perception of the threat of someone bent on ‘taking over the world’, which in itself seems like a quaint concept these days, the lingering strength of the concept of England or Britain as an Island Empire, the overwhelming industrialisation, family life being so massively different and social standards radically so… it’s amazing how quickly people forget what life used to be like, even in their own childhoods.
For the best part of six years my Granddad fought in the British army against someone trying to conquer the nation, and indeed the whole continent. Six years. I don’t think that it would be possible for me to truly grasp that and more than anything else on Remembrance Day, that’s what I find myself thinking.
The Men They Couldn’t Hang – The Green Fields of France (No Man’s Land)
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The Waterboys – Red Army Blues
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Sooo… the BNP are going on Question Time are they? That should be interesting.
