Creating a fairer Britain
The crackle of the bonfire as the kindling took light, and then the whoosh of mad flame as the pyre exploded gave me a shock. Of course, fireworks night. I could see the flames from the nursing home window. For a moment it took me back. May 1945. A barn in the French village of Luneville, not far from the German border. The spring sun had brought out the first rash of lazy flies who buzzed around us curiously. There was an air of unreality about the place. It's just as well war keeps you busy. If it gave you time to stop and think … "They should really fight the war with old people, shouldn't they? Pensioners." Dick had a straw in his mouth and the last word was no more than an explosion and a spit. "Why the hell do they send us? Young men with our whole lives in front of us?"
Hope I die before I get old. That was much later, mind, that was a line from a song my son used to sing. The Sixties. When it was a crime to be old and tainted by the stink of world war and 50 million dead. Nineteen thirty nine. It was a crime to be young then. The punishment was ... Normandy, 1944. You wouldn’t have believed the atmosphere when we joined up. You’d have thought we were going to the seaside for a holiday. Instead here we were, fighting our way from street to street through the charred ruins, winkling out pockets of the SS. Later the padre asked for volunteers to go back to bury the boys. It had to be volunteers: even in war you didn't order a man to take a stroll through a minefield. It was hot. Stinking hot. You could hardly recognise the bodies for the maggots and flies. We buried 14 in a temporary grave - boys I'd been right through the war with. That was all we could do. I broke my heart that day.
And I'm alive to tell the tale. I don't though. When the nurse comes round now she'll say: "How are you doing, Howie? Remembering the good old days, is it?" And I'll tell her the sorts of stories people like to hear. The one about the old lump of bacon I found in a Jerry dugout. And all the boys said: "Don't eat that, Howie. You don't know where it's been. Perhaps the Jerries have poisoned it." The next morning I fried it up on my little stove while the rest of them ate biscuit porridge. "Give us a bit, Howie," they said as the unbelievable smell of bacon wafted through the foxholes. "Fat chance," I told them. And all the while the shells whizzed by like the old trams going round corners in Swansea before the war.
Those were the days my friend. Yes, they were in a way, the days of your youth always are. It wasn’t how I’d been brought up, mind. God, no. Strict chapel and Sunday school on my mother’s side. Trade unionism and pacifism on my dad’s. Thou shalt not kill. That much at least they agreed on. But hell, this was real life. Eighteen years old, joining up to go on a European adventure, fighting for King and country. It was Boys' Own stuff, wasn't it? We were as green as they come.
“All right, Howie? Can you see the bonfire from there?” That’s the nurse again. She likes to know I’m OK. I’ll tell her the one about the French farmer who was so livid when we trampled over his fields he refused to give us milk for our tea. I was up at six the next morning with a bucket milking his cows before breakfast. We were liberating his country after all.
They told us nothing. They didn't tell us where we were going or when; or whether we'd ever come back. They trained us to jump out of a landing craft into two feet of water. Then come D-day, we were unloaded into five feet of rolling surf. Landlubber soldiers, sick as dogs after hours crossing the Channel. So sick we were almost grateful to be able to get off the barge and charge the machine gun nests on the beaches.
When will they ever learn. That was the line, wasn’t it? One of those folk singers, can’t remember her name. But we made the best of it. They couldn't stop you doing that. I remember the green, red and yellow tracers streaking the night sky as the bombers flew overhead above the clouds. I've never seen a fireworks display like it since. And do you know the people there were so glad to see us, they got in the way. There we'd be, fighting our way from street corner to street corner, ducking the sniper fire of the fanatical Hitler Youth rearguard who'd fight to the last man. And the French would be out in the roads waving flags and bottles of wine, celebrating like mad. I remember stealing apples from the orchards along the way, we were so hungry. And we couldn't always be choosy about whether they were ripe or not. Getting the runs was dangerous - many a mate got blown away by a mine when he rushed behind a bush to answer the call of nature. To this day I still check the pan when I go to the toilet. And I'm always up before dawn. I remember taking a hill where the Germans were tucked down in thick concrete pillboxes, and we were stuck out on an open plain. Dawn was about to break and there we were, defenceless and sitting targets. When fear grips your guts, you think: "What if I just get up now and run for it?" There's nowhere to run. The horror still haunts me; lying waiting for dawn to break and the shells to rain down.
He comes to see me often, the boy, when he’s home on leave. I think he feels guilty about me going into a home. But I didn't mind. When the wife died there was no-one to look after me. I can get about, I'm not ga-ga, not yet. But I don't want to be a burden on anyone. What gets me though is – they don’t want to know. They see the wrinkles and the grey hair and the mist veiling your eyes, and they think that’s all there is. We were no different ourselves back then. But that’s supposed to be what separates us from the animals, isn’t it? That we can learn from other people’s mistakes? Do we hell, though!
I don't like Mondays. That was another one he used to sing. I had to laugh at that. You died as easily on one day as any other. Now there was a Monday to remember - May 7, 1945, the day we got news of the ceasefire. The villagers went wild. They dragged out wine from their cellars, food - God knows where they found all the stuff. Dick and I wandered off for a bit. We wanted to take it in quietly. We took a bottle of cider and found a barn and lay down in the straw with the sun filtering through the broken roof and talked about home. And what the hell we were going to do when we got there. And we thought about all the boys who weren't going home. One time we’d commandeered eight boats to cross the river Seine. Seven of them were hit by a tidal bore and capsized. Fourteen men died, weighed down by their guns and equipment. Dick and I were in the eighth boat. What a way to go. They could have gone that way on a fishing trip off Gower. To have come so far through the bullets and the stench of smoke and death. Dick was right. They should fight the war with pensioners.
The nurse just laughed when I told her that. "You'd never put up with it," she said. "You'd complain your bed wasn't at the right angle and the food was the same as yesterday. And if it was cold, or damp they'd never get any fighting out of you." Aye, and quite right too. Anyway, who says we don't put up with anything? It is cold, and the bed is uncomfortable. And what do you know about having all these memories locked inside you? Sometimes I'd like to think you had an inkling, even an inkling, of what it was like.
I never went to veterans' meetings till after the wife died. It's not as if we talk about it - hardly ever, in fact. It's just that at least they know what it was all about. You know that they've seen shrapnel rip their best friend's face apart as if it was no more than a roll of tissue paper. And you know they've lifted a gun in anger and shot another human being. They’ve broken the final taboo. That's what we were there to do. Mild men, most of them. Humane men, who've seen a part of humanity they'd rather not have seen at all.
And then Dick and I went from the barn into the village and joined the music and the dancing and the serious singing and told each other in broken English and broken French that we'd beaten the bastards, we'd beaten the bastards, we'd won the bloody war for freedom and democracy and there wasn't going to be another one. And if a Jerry soldier had wandered into the celebrations we'd have clapped him on the back in broken German too. Well, maybe not.
I’ve met lots of them since, mind. The Jerries, the Hun, the Bosh. Swansea’s twinned with Mannheim - we met up with them every year with the male voice choir. No different from us. Just ordinary people trying to do the best by their families, enjoying their beer, trying to get on, doing what they’re told.
"You all right, Howie? You’re not drifting off to the war again are you? What do you think of the fireworks?”
That’s the nurse again. What shall I tell her now? I’ll tell her about the time we took over a girls' school outside Arnhem. We were a small fighting patrol, each man defending a small classroom. It was like a scene from Beau Geste. The officer came into every room one by one and fired his automatic so Jerry would think there were more of us. One of the enemy crept below my window. I spotted him just in time before he threw a grenade into the room. The nurse smiles and shakes her head. She never asks, and I never tell her. I never tell her how I shot him in the temple. Point blank. How he froze a moment in time and scarred himself onto my memory. I looked into his eyes as he died. Blue, they were, piercing blue. Can’t have been more than 15 or 16. I looked into eyes like that every day of my life after my son was born. Never a day goes by when I don't think about the curse of war.
The war to end all wars. What a laugh. And that was the First World War they were talking about. But like I always told the boy. It’s not war that ends wars, or defeats evil, or upholds democracy. It’s something that goes on up here. In the head.
If there’s just one thing I could change about my life it’s that. If, instead of a bullet in the temple of that young German soldier, I could have planted this single thought - the dying won’t end until we stop the fighting.
We. That’s you and me, brother. You and me.