My
father ran away from home and joined the Army. He was just 14. The
third eldest of nine, he was tall for his age and passed for 16.
After basic training he joined The King's Own Hussars and was posted to Egypt. Each week
he sent money home.
The
regiment did a lot of reconnaissance, long expeditions into the
desert in Riley armoured cars to explore the terrain and make maps. He enjoyed this work and was good at it: he got promoted to corporal and sergeant, climbed the pyramids, learned how to deal with scorpions, drank mint tea. Then the war began. He
became a 'Desert Rat', fighting a series of losing battles against
Rommel as the 8th
Army retreated across North Africa towards Cairo. My father
distinguished himself under fire and rose rapidly through the ranks
to Major, with command of a squadron of tanks.
The
decisive battle of the campaign took place at El Alamein in 1942. At
the opening of the battle my father was ordered to undertake a night
attack on the German lines. His squadron of tanks were caught in an
artillery crossfire and most were destroyed. A shell exploded into my
father's tank: the gunner and driver were killed, he was blown clear.
Half of his unit were killed in the attack, the rest were captured.
He later learned that this attack was diversionary and all of his
unit were deemed expendable. He never forgave Montgomery.
Wounded,
my father was captured and sent to a transit camp near Bari in Italy.
After months of only pumpkin soup, the prisoners were loaded into
railway cattle-trucks and taken to Germany. At first he was held in a
large camp Stalag VIIIB (in Silesia) then he was transferred to a
smaller camp Oflag VA (in the Black Forest). Here he spent three
years as a POW until the camp was liberated by Patton: he recalled
him standing on the bonnet of a jeep with two ivory-handled revolvers.
The American soldiers gave the prisoners bars of chocolate, which
they wolfed down and then were violently sick. After years of
starvation their stomachs just couldn’t cope with the rich food.
After
the war he was slowly squeezed out of the Army. The British class
system reasserted itself: the son of a village milkman couldn't
really be a senior member of the officer class. He tried a range of jobs but
didn't find anything that suited him. He ended up working in a
nylon factory, got married and had three sons.
'What
did you do in the war, Dad?' As a kid, I asked him again and
again. Often as we sat together in the front room watching war films
on TV: John Wayne, John Mills, et al, being heroic. But he would
always leave me unsatisfied, only saying that he had fought in the
desert and had been a POW. He never disclosed any other details. When
pressed he would shake his head and say 'it's nothing like in the
films - a lot of good men never came back', then he would leave the room. And when at mealtimes, I
or one of my brothers would say, 'I'm starving!' He would snap, 'you
don’t know what starving is'. Cowed, we would stare at our plates
as mother dished out the spuds.
I
left home, became a student, took drugs and grew my hair long,
identifying with anti-establishment figures such as John Lennon. My
father's Army career was an embarrassment. We became estranged.
Much
later I read Solzhenitsyn and Primo Levi, books that brought home to
me the horrors of incarceration in camps and the desperate everyday struggle
for survival. I bought copies of them for my father. He thanked me
for the books. Next time I asked him what he thought. He said he
didn’t get on with reading them.
I
tried another tack. Buying him a lined journal and pens, I suggested
he could write down some memories. Secretly I hoped he would use his
neat, precise handwriting to describe the story of his life. Again he
thanked me for the present, but on my next visit I noticed the pages
of the journal were still blank.
My
father's place was outside, especially the garage. This was his workshop: stuffed with timber and carpentry tools, sweet with wood-shavings and sawdust. Here he smoked
his 'forbidden' cigarettes, cupped furtively in his hand, and designed
the pieces of furniture he would make.
Deeply
troubled by my own past, I sought him out. Gill, the woman I was
going to marry, had been killed in an accident. After burying the
pain for a decade, I was going through therapy. Slowly I unfolded the
story of my loss to him. He listened raptly, nodding and pursing his
lips. When I stopped, he reached into his pocket and offered me a
cigarette. I smiled and shook my head.
Then
he started towards me and began to speak. How he ran away from home
because he had been made to go to work as an assistant in a draper's.
How he joined the cavalry because he loved horses, but they changed
them for armoured cars and tanks. How the desert became so cold at
night and the sky would be sparking with stars.
His
stories spilled out across the workshop. Mine did too. Belated
confidences offered like treasure. We spent hours talking and then
went indoors. My mother knew something was happening, but couldn't
work out what it was. We kept our exchanges to ourselves. The next
morning he went out to the workshop, I joined him and we did it all
over again.
I
came home regularly that Autumn and sojourned with him in the
workshop. On New Year's Day I got a call from my brother, my father
was in hospital after a massive stroke. I rushed to his bedside. He
was paralysed down one side and had lost the power of speech. He
remained in hospital, but never spoke again. My father died three
months later.
