My Dad

(Written 10/09/2010, in response to a continuing discussion in the little group of writers I'm pleased to belong to.)

> My father's never had any desire to revel in old glories, march in
> parades, wear his medals or join a veterans network. When he was
> demobbed, he wanted to put the war behind him and build a new life. I
> think a lot of his contemporaries thought in the same way.

My father was exactly the same. In fact, for most of my life, he didn't talk about his part in the war, beyond the barest details. He began to offer more details as he turned 70, and developed a wish to see some of the places where he'd been. Over time, that became an idea to tour Italy, following the route he'd taken with the Army, and to that end he joined the Burma Star Association, because they offered discounted travel and a lot of information from people who'd done the same trek.

Sadly, he died very suddenly and with no warning a few months before he and Mum intended to leave for Italy. That was fifteen years ago. Obviously, I miss him a lot, and I'm sorry that he didn't live to see the founding and success of <my company name> - indeed, I daresay I could have got some good business advice from him. I'm particularly sorry, too, that he only started opening up about the war in the last few years of his life, because there are so many questions I'd like to ask him.

Dad left school at 14 because he had to, his own father having deserted the family. When he was conscripted, he was working as a cleaner/sweeper/tea maker and general "Hey, you, hold this!" person in a garage, so naturally, the Army put him down as a mechanic. He spent most of the war repairing tanks, which meant following them across the top of Africa (visiting El Alamein in the process), through Egypt and into Palestine, then to Italy, taking the Monte Cassino route, all the way up to Trieste, then running supplies down through what would become Yugoslavia. Along the way, he had his face burned off and was nursed in an Italian convent - it grew back, thanks to an excellent surgeon and some very tough nuns - and the closest he came to a living German was when he bumped into one, on a very dark night. (They both ran in opposite directions, he said.)

He saw lots of dead Germans, though, and on one occasion when he really opened up, he wondered how it had been possible to stop his lorry for lunch on a road where there were many German dead lying around, and eat his sandwiches while watching, with only slight interest, the flesh of the corpses rippling as maggots got to work. Dad offered that as an illustration of what war did to people.

As you'll understand, pals, I wish I could have asked him more questions, because there was much that he didn't tell us. Mum tells me that he really didn't think that it was all that important, and he rarely spoke about the war with her, either.

I can't resist adding that when Dad was demobbed, he went back to the garage as a time-served mechanic, graduated to guv'ner, left to be Parts Manager with a small chain of garages, created the first computerised stock ordering system in the UK in 1961 (with the assistance of a long-gone business machine company), and ended up as Parts Director and Board Member for a huge garage chain before retiring. Not bad for a kid who left school at 14 with no qualifications.

He is my hero, as every son's father ought to be.