大象传媒

This is a story I began to piece together many years ago from things said by my father, Sydney Brooks (1917-92), about his brother Arthur (1920-1946).
My uncle Arthur had died before I was born. Unlike my father, who was resigned to the call-up even if he was not exactly salivating at the prospect (see my other story, 鈥淲hat did you do in the war, Daddy?鈥�), my uncle really did not want to be called up, but of course he was. He apparently earned a reputation as a 鈥渂arrack-room lawyer鈥�, someone who was as awkward as possible without ever quite breaking the rules. All this is hearsay, of course, via my father; but both my mother and my father鈥檚 cousin Kath, who knew Arthur, confirmed to me that he was a strange and difficult man.
He spent an uneventful war in the U.K. until after the post D-Day break-out, when he was sent to France and joined the advance into Germany. Or at least, the rear of the advance. My father said his brother would not have been avoiding front-line duty as that, at least, was not in his nature. He just simply never saw any action.
We shall never know his side of it. My uncle became a member of the Occupying Force, stationed in Germany, and later died in a traffic accident there. I have never researched the accident, which neither my father nor my mother nor my grandmother would ever speak of, except that once my grandmother referred sorrowfully to 鈥渢he lorry鈥�. I do not know whether he was a passenger in it, was driving it, or was knocked down by it. I fear I might find something to his discredit.
Before he died, he had sent home two 78 rpm gramophone records, containing messages. He also sang on them, believing, like most men (I suppose) that he could sing like Bing Crosby. (I haven鈥檛 made that up: he says so on the records.)
I don鈥檛 know how the records were made, but I suppose the army made the facilities available.
My grandmother, who died in 1971, kept them in a drawer and would occasionally get them out and show them to me, but would not listen to them because they distressed her. After she died, my father tried to find them, intending to destroy them; but I had already been to her house the day after she died, with my own key, and removed them because I guessed what he intended to do. I was very close to my grandmother, and something told me she would have wanted them kept.
I never told him I had them. If he ever thought about it at all, I suppose he assumed she had thrown them away. I have only listened to them a couple of times but I still have them. It is strange to hear not only the broad Northampton accent that has more or less disappeared nowadays and to realise that the brash self-confident wise-cracking but also self-mocking tommy immortalised by many actors in early World War II films was not entirely a fictional creation. I am thinking, for example, of the Tommy Trinder roles in The Foreman went to France and (as a fireman) The Bells Go Down. With due allowance for the fact that my Uncle Arthur was neither an actor nor a cockney, he seems to have projected, in these recordings at least, the same sort of image.

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