Too young to have fought in WW2 but old enough 

to mourn my lost friends

As we approach Remembrance Sunday I’ve been thinking about my non-existent military career: three years in the school CCF, with the scratchy bloody uniform, as a spotty private, endlessly running around the quad with two Sten guns as punishment for what I cannot remember. And, being too young for National Service, I didn’t have to endure that, though older friends who did report mostly happy memories.

Aylett, for it is he, did his stint in the RAF in Germany and survived to tell the tale of driving his Jeep, with three fellow conscripts, into the Soviet block. They crossed the dreaded line in a muddy field and when the searchlights came on his pals piled out and legged it back into the West leaving Aylett to try to find reverse but sinking ever deeper in the quagmire. The authorities never knew. Until now, should they subscribe to this fine organ...

In 1991 on a visit to Pakistan I lunched with the officers of the Khyber Rifles, a week after they had entertained Princess Diana. I think they preferred the company of the princess. The regiment’s hq is half way up the Khyber Pass at Landi Kotal and the soundtrack to our meal was the dull crump of landmines being exploded following Moscow’s doomed 10-year excursion into Afghanistan.

That’s the extent of my time with the Forces though I am proud to have been a trustee of the charity Coming Home, a division of the British Legion and through that, meeting the remarkable Cayle Royce. Royce, a South African corporal in the Light Dragoons lost both legs when he stepped on an IED in Helmand in 2012. After 48 days in an induced coma and a year of rehab, Royce rowed the Atlantic as part of a four-man able and disabled team. Since then he has done many other crazy things raising millions for charity.

I was discussing this with an aunt who said my grandfather and his two brothers had seen the worst of the horrors of the First World War after volunteering. My mother’s father died long before I was born, never recovering from gas attacks by the Germans. Ditto his two brothers. My aunt related how one of them, Richard Lowry from Co Armagh, had been awarded the Military Cross, the highest honour for valour after the VC, for ‘outstanding bravery’. Though I never knew him (he died in 1922) I was inordinately proud of my uncle.

In 2018 I was at the Centenary Armistice Day service in the chapel of my old school, an event so brilliantly choreographed it made me weep. In front of us was a vast black and white photograph of the 1914 First XV team and the house master who coached the team.

They had won that year’s Ulster Schools’ Cup and on July 28, the day war was declared, instead of preparing for their universities and their futures they volunteered to serve. Four of the team, each just 18-years-old, were killed along with the master. Four boys, just a few months older than they were in that photograph, all baggy shorts and the team shirt with the Maltese Cross. Dead.

As the Head said that morning: ‘As you listen to the 84 names of the Old Boys who died in the Great War, remember they walked up the steps of School House just as you do, studied in the same classrooms, played in the same teams, shared the same jokes, the same dreams, the same loves, the same ambitions.’

It is a picture which summed up the terrible futility of war and when I watch the Cenotaph service on Sunday it’s the one which will be in my mind.

 

*****

 

Talking of which, my great history master PP Fry, an Old Boy and Ulster provincial rugby player, was a noted flyer in WW2 ending up a squadron leader In his 20s.This was his favourite poem on war:

 

Young men, little more than schoolboys,

Jousting with the Luftwaffe in the skies

To determine whose turn it is to die today.

If it’s mine it means I’ll not have seen the wily one

That came at me from out of the sun

And set my world alight.

And then, how shall I fare?

I trust that you, so very far below,

Will never get to know the way of it.

 

*****

 In my most recent Jottings I said that I might now be reporting on the re-run of the American Civil War. At least the landslide by the odious Orange Manbaby spared us that. God save America and God save us all.

 

*****

I lost a good friend four days ago and so has proper inquiring journalism. In particular the Philip Geddes Journalism Prize set up in memory of the young Express star who was killed in the 1984 Harrods bomb.

Paddy Coulter was on the Geddes committee and helped drive it along with our own Christopher Wilson. He was also Director of Studies at the Reuters Institute and an award-winning television producer and journalist. He has also been a trustee of Oxfam, UNICEF and Comic Relief. 

We were at school together before he left for Oxford and me to the Street of Shame. A group of us including Paddy would meet for lunch in Oxford and the next is in four weeks time. Sadly there will be an empty seat but he will be very much there in our hearts.

ALAN FRAME

8 October 2024