My Granda's War

My Granda didn’t talk much about the war. Growing up in South Armagh in the late 60s and early 70s, we didn’t talk much about it either. But I remember my child’s chilling fascination with the secret realisation that when they showed the blurred, disjointed black-and-white images of the Western Front on television, my Granda had been there.

Like many young Irish men, I suspect, he had enlisted not out of any sense of political allegiance or moral duty, but to put as much distance as possible between his handsome, feckless nineteen-year-old self and a not inconsiderable pile of trouble at home. I say ‘home,’ but he had already been living outside any family structure for years. Besides, the army gave him regular pay, put clothes on his back and food in his belly.
Heroism and self-sacrifice was incomprehensible to him and he relied on the cynical wisdom of old soldiers to ensure he survived unscathed. Occasionally, he treated us to fond reminiscences of his time billeted with a young widow and her adult daughter who ran a cider press in Normandy- and offered generous supplies of, apparently, everything, to their young Irish guests.

The advice of one old soldier- to scrape the mould from a bully beef tin into a flesh wound, infect it and be invalided out, backfired spectacularly when this early experiment with the properties of penicillin cured his leg overnight. (I’ve included this incident in the stage play.) He did manage two extended periods of sick leave, not with war wounds, but scabies. Later, another piece of advice undoubtedly did save his life- when he was warned to stay back and not be among the first to emerge from a foxhole and surrender to the Germans. The first out were, inevitably, shot.

His stilted pronunciation of the German machine-gun post, the Schwaben Redoubt, sounds to me from every written account of the Battle of Messines.

Prisoner of war records are very difficult to trace and, for now, I have to accept at face value his tales of being held in comparative comfort in an island off the coast of Italy- with little security, glorious weather and, in his case, 2 Red Cross parcels for every other PoW’s one, due to an unfortunate recruit with an almost identical name having been killed, but not reported missing. This enabled him to run a profitable business bartering cigarettes and other little luxuries. Racketeering, if you like.

I was too young to analyse his legacy of bitterness. I do know that, to my father’s disappointment, he was devoid of any religious faith and had little time for it in others. He railed against the British class system, the bosses, the industrialists, the civil servants, the exploitation of the working man. He found himself alone in a hostile and capitalist universe and took solace in chain smoking, declaiming Burns’ poetry, reading Westerns, betting on anything that moved and- bizarrely- following cricket on the radio and cursing at the England captain. Any England captain.

He would never wear a poppy and another story I have yet to disprove or authenticate is that some disillusioned ex soldiers wore a white poppy- to commemorate their dead, but advocate pacifism.

He did not tolerate two of his sons’ decision, taken at separate times and places, to enlist in WW11. Their reasons were more idealistic than his, a generation earlier; they had to do with the moral, ethical and political arguments for opposition to the Nazi regime. Yet putting on a British uniform would, in their turn, take them far from social deprivation and troubles at home- and, in my Da’s case, sideways out of the class system, forever.