Tears Of A Father Remembered...

...dreamt last night of my late Papa and he in tears. Not unconnected with today, Remembrance Sunday, I believe.

In life only twice saw the fellow weeping: from agonising, physical pain and again from some unknown personal sorrow. The second, of course, the harder for any off-spring to take. Children understand that a scrapped knee must be cried over, but confronted with a parental wounded heart and the boy's world of certainty and comfort dissolves.

Never did find out or was told - though one guessed - the particular cause of that second demonstrable distress. Not a heart-on-sleeve chap at all in many regards was Papa. A generational thing quite possibly, though also fitting his own unique style. The War was, unsurprisingly, therefore not a topic of any great conversational exchange over the years 'twixt us. The "So what then precisely did you do in the War?" question was regularly asked and, only intermittently, answered.

Dreams dashed of being a fighter pilot, enlistment in the infantry, refusal to allow self to be put up for a commission (on the 'All officers are idiots, why would I wish to become an idiot too?' line), service in North Africa as artillery spotter, some terrible wounding later in Italy leading to a non-combatant liaison post at the University in Perugia and then eventually to home and the life less martial. That, more or less, the general mapping of it.

The wounding thing long puzzled the child. No visible scarring, all limbs accounted for, and so forth; so how and where then the enemy attack? Was not a tale that could be told to a boy, needed the grown man to hear it in truth.

Taking shelter from shelling in a roadside ditch, a near-by blast blew him clean out of the ditch, through the air some thirty feet and more into ditch opposite side of the road. Not physically damaged, beyond some busted bones, but utterly terrified. One minute later and the same damn thing. Second shell lands close by with another mighty bang, Papa again sailing like a rag doll through the air landing with terrific crash once more and back into the very first spot from whence he had begun, further busted bones ensuing. (Not many unbusted by this point one gathered.)

The subsequent rescue, long hospitalisation with necessary limb-mending was not, though, the end of the tale. This the bit that took all his telling and all my hope to try and comprehend - the mind too had taken a mighty beating. We would say now post-traumatic stress, though the old-fashioned phrase shell-shock more literally applying in his case.

It was - for him - the happening of it twice in rapid succession that was his undoing. You can see his point. Once is pretty wretched but is done with once done. But if not, if instead an immediate second burst of noise, of terror, of being tossed through the air and of pain - and taken with that the sense of humiliating helplessness, of being played with - then there is thence only the compelling anticipation of the third blow imminently to come.

That the dread which had him cowering in darkened corners, sobbing. That the horror which clean took away his mind, his heart and his courage for the best part of a year it seems. Eventually mended - or at least patched up and papered-over - there was to be no more fighting but the administration of a, largely superfluous, 'de-fascism' programme for the locals.

There were no tears - of his - in the eventual telling of the full story. The men and women today in their Whitehall march-past are largely dry-eyed too, if intensely staring in fierce remembrance of the particular horrors each has witnessed and experienced. That is their way as it was Papa's. I though do dream his tears for him in remembrance of and respect for all their enduring sacrifice.