Remembrance
So, what’s this site
about?
King George the Fifth, visiting
World War One battle sites and graveyards in 1922 wondered, of the gravestones
“… whether there can be more potent
advocates of peace upon earth through the years to come, than this massed
multitude of silent witnesses to the desolation of war."
We now know that history
proved, and continues to prove him wrong. As well as being about, and for, my
Dad, this site is respectfully dedicated to the courage and sacrifice made by
so very many, so that Europe is as it is today. Not perfect, for sure; but how
much better it is compared to where it could have gone I will leave up to your
own imagination.
I was particularly struck
by the ‘Spirit of Place’ that Normandy has- it is a vibrant and stimulating
area, but history is everywhere; and the blood and tears spilt on that land
will not, and should not, ever fade from memory. The Normans are very proud of
their own culture, and equally proud and grateful for what the British,
Americans, Canadians, Norwegians, Polish….. etc did for them, to allow that
culture to survive. Of all the pictures I took, this one is to me as simple and
eloquent as it can get: this is a basic, “normal” suburban street, that could
be anywhere in the world, it has a school, houses, neat rows of trees,
neighbours chatting over the fence to eachother… etc: this is Free France, 59
years on
As I write this it is
still very fresh in my mind how old, and how few the veterans are becoming. In
not so many years there will be none left, and eloquent as the pictures,
movies, written accounts and taped interviews are; when that war ceases to have
any living witnesses it becomes somehow ‘further away’ and less real- it is
already, in one respect “the last war that happened in black and white”- as our
visual records are largely in that medium…. And the less in consciousness
something is the closer it is to being allowed to happen again…. This week
there has been neo-Nazi vandalism of Jewish cemeteries on Jersey…..
It seems so long ago, and
yet it has shaped the last 60 years; people of my generation were born and grew
up not so long after it…. I recall in my village there were a lot of oldish and
sad-looking lone women, and a lot of youngish men who were often quiet and
certainly old before their time. But they came home, and picked up their lives
much as they had before the war. My Dad played cricket and football, a
professional career in either or both sports being at least partially prevented
by the war (he had trials with Middlesex for cricket, Charlton, Portsmouth and
possibly Arsenal at soccer) and the economics of the time (footballers then
earned less than mechanics, unlike today); so he carried on a career as an
engineer, gardened, and ran the village cricket club as a volunteer for
decades; including being offered a job on the Lords’ grounds staff; the home of
professional cricket, when in his fifties- which he declined largely due to not
wanting the bother of commuting. My friend Albert, who taught me to fish and
play snooker, had been in the Italian campaign, and was a sniper. He had thus
obviously killed people, but in common with all the others, would not talk in
that kind of detail- hysterically funny stories of stealing pianos from US Army
Officers’ Messes would come out, but none of the bloodier details.
Dad had a story about training in REME in 1939 or 40- one of the vehicle engineers exam
papers had a question of the form "describe the steps you would take to
check and adjust the brake fluid on a XXXXX (a specific named vehicle of some
kind)". Dad said that anyone who didn't write "release the catches
and open the bonnet" first, failed that question. Anyone who wrote that
and then gave an accurate description of how to check, top up and -or bleed brake
fluid got half marks. To get a pass on that question you had to say
something like "open the bonnet. Ascertain that this vehicle is
operated on cable brakes, with no fluid system present". Extra credit was
gained for a written answer that described how to check and adjust the cable
system. Very few got through that one, Dad was one (hence the story being told,
i guess), probably because he was 5 years into a motor mechanics apprenticeship
when he joined up......
Dad’s friend Syd had been
captured at Tobruk, and there were people in the village that had survived the
Burma railway. Just outside the village was a huge crater where a bomber had
crashed, with a full load of explosive….. it was all around us as children, but
never openly spoken about. Dad, Albert, Syd and most of their ilk are gone now;
and much as I hope the world never needs their like again as soldiers, we are
the poorer for not having them around as people. There is an article I wrote (for another site) a while back
about Dad here
I still don’t know what my
trip to Normandy was about- all I do know for sure is that I had a ‘calling’ to
go there for 18 months, and I’ve done that now. What it has done is made me
want to go back, next time as a volunteer with a Veterans group, which I’m
trying to arrange already. I always
feel close to Dad, but maybe closer still now, and although there were some
small, and private, revelations while I was over there, no great mystical
experiences- but if anything it reinforces the fact that you don’t know what
tomorrow will bring, and tell the people that you love just how much you love
them while you can. The other, more general thing about remembrance is that
people live on in the memories of those that love them, and the continuation
and re-tellign of that memory. So I fervently hope that when I am old and all
the veterans are long gone I can be sat somewhere boring young people to tears
with what I know about that war, in the hope that they are interested in
hearing about it- because there hadn’t been an intervening war to compare to
it.
The ‘Hollywood ending’ of
my trip to Normandy would have been to serendipitously bump into someone Dad
served with, and talk for hours, finding out great details- that didn’t happen,
and I’m not sure I would have wanted that….. I think I always knew what I need
to know anyway, and a few days after I got home from France, with beautiful
timing, Dad’s Army Records arrived in the post, having been requested months
before. His discharge papers said: “an excellent workman, not afraid of
responsibility, hard-working, reliable, sober and honest: thoroughly
recommended”.
And he always was that.
Tom Evans, 1920-2000