I’ve not been up this early on
a Sunday for a while, but as today is Remembrance Day I was ready to make my
way to Victoria Embankment for the service. As is the usual way for me, I wore
my late Granddad’s RAF pins. He sent his medals back as a form of protest, I intend
to get round to researching the RAF archives to find out what he was decorated
for one day, I could get the medals if I wanted but I feel it would go against
my Granddad as he didn’t want them anymore once he felt that the country he fought
for had let him down in some way. I also wish I knew what had pissed him off
enough to carry out what is considered the highest form of protest. We took
Jack with us to give him a nice walk out, but realised almost immediately that
it wasn’t the best idea in the world as a few other people had also brought
dogs along and Jack always tries to pick a fight with them, even the bigger
ones. I didn’t want him making a noise during the silence so Mandi took him
away.
It’s on Remembrance Day more
than any other that I think of my Granddad. Known to my sister and me as ‘Granddad
Eddie’, he died of a heart attack at the ridiculously young age of 62. I was
nine years old and remember how upsetting this was, maybe because he was my
first experience of death, but more likely because I really loved him. We didn’t
live in Nottingham when I was a child so visits from grandparents were an
exciting event that happened a few times a year. Knowing what happened to my Granddad
during the Second World War, I wish that I could have known him as an adult.
Nobody has a bad word to say about him, and I have a picture in my mind of a
man who just has love and respect following him around. Maybe what he went
through as a POW shaped him; by all accounts he was an exceptionally funny man
in a social situation, an intelligent man who could pop down the cellar and
invent something to make life easier, a musician and music teacher, a band
manager and from my memory a lovely grandparent.
As a grownup I learned not
only about his experiences during the war, but the fact that he lied about his
age at sixteen to enlist. I can’t help but wonder what sort of a man he would
have been had he not had to endure those horrors. Maybe he’d still be alive? He
lived his life with stress, depression, and nightmares, still sleeping with a
light on because he didn’t want to be reminded of being locked up in a darkened
cell. His diet, constant stream of heavily sugared tea, and his dragging down
up to one hundred cigarettes a day obviously added to his heart attack risk,
but maybe, (and it is a big maybe) if there had been such a thing as counseling
for what we now refer to as post-traumatic stress disorder had been around when
he needed it, it would have been of some benefit. Granddad never spoke about
his experience in any great detail, which I think would have helped him to an
extent. If he was still alive today I would probably take a chance and ask him
if he would talk to me about it, possibly for a biography. One day I might
write his biography as a form of closure (as the therapists and Americans call
it) as I never even had the chance to say goodbye to him. Even if it doesn’t
get published, it will be of some help to me.
all photographs from The Oliver Family Archive
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