These are my paternal grandparents, plus my dad as a kid.
I want to write – on Remembrance Day – few words about my grandad.
I was quite close to my grandad. He was the “favourite” of all my grandparents I think. He was a quiet, gentle, kind, unassuming man. My gran was a difficult person to live with, and not easy to love. She was a fierce and demanding character, but my grandad loved her and never complained. He was always happy to be in the background, reading his newspaper, playing football with me in the back yard or on the Rec at Alresford. My other grandad died suddenly when I was 7 and I only have fleeting recollections of him. Grandad Jack as I knew him, died in 1976 after a long time living with stomach cancer. I have a strangely detailed recollection of the funeral and burial, esp when his brother – George I think, or maybe it was Joe – stood over the coffin as it was being lowered in and said, in a most matter-of-fact way “Goodbye Jack, see you again soon.” It was both comfortingly intimate and also deeply poignant. It was my first experience with death, and I don’t think it has ever really left me.
The last summer he was alive was the gloriously hot summer of 1976. We were on holiday in Minehead, and my dad drove him down to spend some time with us (he never learnt to drive). He was walking with a frame at that point because he was pretty sick. We walked along the beach together – slowly – and he would sit and watch while my sister and I squabbled in the sand. Later that autumn he came up to stay with us in Kendal. I remember he came to watch me play football when I was eleven. He died a couple of months later.
The picture above shows him just after he had joined up. On the back of the photo my gran wrote the following:
He carried it with him in the army, until he returned home after the war. My gran and my dad were evacuated out of London during the war to Alresford in Hampshire. Although the rest of my aunts and uncles returned to London, my grandparents decided to stay in Hampshire, and they lived there the rest of their lives. My grandad got a job as a bricklayer, and worked in construction for the rest of his days. They lived in a small rented bungalow owned by the local council. They never bought a home. Never owned a car. Never really went on holidays. We used to go and visit them for Sunday lunch and I remember playing cards with him.
He never spoke much about his wartime experiences. He was called up when he was quite old and he spent the war repairing and working on the De Havilland Mosquito, a plane that was made primarily out of wood. He was a carpenter by training. He never saw any combat, for which I am very grateful.
In many ways he had an extremely ordinary, unremarkable war. There were no heroics, no brave deeds. He just quietly did his job, without fuss or alarm, and he did it to the best of his ability. This seems perfectly in keeping with the kind of person he was: loyal, steadfast, gentle, devoted. Although the family comes originally from German Jewish immigrants to London in the 19th century, I have no idea how any of this affected his wartime experiences or motivations. I think he just thought that he was doing his duty.
As the time ticks around to 11am on Remembrance Day, and I consider his wartime life – alongside all the lives that I have been reading about for my research on WW2 – I am struck by the ordinariness of his time in the war, and yet how extraordinary those times were. There are unseen millions of stories about the war that will never be told. The separation from family. the disruption. the deep uncertainty, the anxiety, all these things are never really captured in histories of the war. They say the real war will never get into the books, and this is true both for the horror and trauma of what people went through. But also the everyday losses that people experienced, and lived through and endured.
I occasionally look at this photo of the three of them. I know he carried it with him. A memory of home, a reminder of what he was missing and also what he was fighting for. I wonder how often he held it and turned it over in his hands?
It is said that when prisoners were captured, or when dead bodies of the enemy were discovered, if they found a photo of the family back home, or their lover, then this massively reduced the hatred they felt towards them. It rehumanised them, because they too had family, and kids and friends and lovers back home. Abstract hatred was replaced by a sense of shared humanity, a solidarity in separation, a communal loss stretching across the artificial divisions of warfare.
He was sent his medals after the war. They arrived in a tiny little box.
When I hold this, I feel the connection with my past. I will pass it onto my kids, just as my dad passed it on to me.
And in some way, this small box will hold us all together, connect us, help us all to remember.
lest we forget
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