I wear my poppy in memory of my Dad’s suffering but 

not necessarily with pride

By PAT PRENTICE

Mourner or mountebank, jingoist or genuine?

As the war memorials are draped with poppies and possibly poseurs once again, the undesirable balancing act is repeated.

When genuine sorrow for the fallen recedes with time and nationalist posturing and arrogance is incubated once more, like an old man reminiscing about the ancient blow that bequeathed him his aching bone, I sometimes wonder how many generations it can take to heal the trauma of a war — or absorb its lessons.

Certainly, for my generation the shadow of the First World War, which led to Remembrance Day, consistently dawdled in the rear. Its spectres were always there in our little house. Grey columns filed along the passage and up the stairs, across the landing to join my Dad in his bedroom as the reading candle guttered.

His coughing, like the guns, was relentless. Intermittently, like spent shell cases, his sputum was spat into the bucket beside the bed. Like a crack sniper, he never missed.

Sometimes, in the early morning, he joined the shades in their mud and unspeakable fear and his cries and screams from sleep startled the house. We would lie stiff in our beds and listen. Never would we venture along the landing to wake him or try to help. My mother, who was proudly five feet eight and a half inches tall in her stockinged feet and sturdy, warned us often to stay away and sometimes would call softly in the fearful, chilling silence, to remind us in the darkness.

Are you awake? It’s all right. He’s only having a silly nightmare. Go back to sleep.

He was only dreaming.

Once she had tried to wake him with a touch and his shocked grip, still asleep, left her nearly choked, but with luck, he awoke in time. They agreed afterwards that it would be better if he was left to sleep alone.

He rarely talked about war, although he served in them both, from Dardanelles boy bugler at 17 and the Somme, to Dunkirk and gun emplacements around airfields in Lincolnshire and instructing the Home Guard with a Geordie-Irish accent that some thought was German. On one occasion he had his finger slammed in a gun breech and hurt so badly that it would hang at its tip for the rest of his days: his most insignificant wound the most visible.

He was discharged from the Army with chronic chest problems before the Second World War ended. Mum, who was a nurse, cared for him in hospital and nature took its course.

Much later, on the day of his funeral, Father Mulligan would tell me that in the 14-18 War, Dad was sent back blinded to Blighty to die from a gas-filled trench and the butt of a German rifle smacked into his forehead; how the German was in turn pinned to the parapet by a kilted Scot’s bayonet; how Dad recovered and went back to war – twice, as it turned out. That he had killed eleven men – enemy soldiers, if it comforted him, but I can’t be certain it ever did. He never told me any of that, and I’m not sure what the proprieties of confession are between priest, father and son after death.

It was all long ago, and nobody cares now, except me.

He often said, as he shook his head distastefully at the paraders on Remembrance days, that it was time it was all forgotten.

But he obviously never did.

If your country was good enough to live in it was good enough to fight for, he said, but I wonder if he would have bothered had he thought his destiny would be decided by the likes of Tony Bliar.

He must have realised that after the wars, when many good patriots lay decomposing, the future of their countries would be composed often by collaborators and former enemies now embraced in profitable business harmony.

I am saddened by the fact that although it is fine to fight for your country, if you are wounded and disabled you can soon be discarded and neglected by the State: that our ex-Servicemen are regularly forgotten and left to eke out their penury-pulled half-pints in lonely pub corners whilst profiteering warmongers share out the spoils of the wars they engineered.

And I am always nervous that instead of assembling in humility among the true veterans who mourn their lost comrades on Remembrance Sunday, I might unintentionally stumble among strutting pretenders who glorify themselves and encourage from behind the next generation of volunteers to die.

For the surviving forgotten heroes whose fiscal and psychiatric wellbeing is too often ignored by the nation they fought for, I contribute money and wear my poppy.

But not necessarily with pride.

8 November 2024