Remembrance

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.