大象传媒

Adolf Hitler - my father's part in his downfall?

I wish I knew more than the fragments my father told me, but neither he, nor my mother who served in the WAAF, ever spoke in detail of their respective 'miltary careers'. They signed up early, were lowly in rank - my father always maintained this was by his own choice: 'All officers were fools, why would I want to become a fool?'

They served where they were posted, and they survived when many didn't. After it was all over, they turned away from the horror, the fear and the tedium towards a new post-war Britain of Billy Butlin's Holiday Camps, tennis clubs and Round Table charitable works, underpinned by earnest commitment to work as a means of achieving both personal advancement and social cohesion.

A child's lessons

I was born in 1952, seven years after it ended. Now, of course, those years seem so few, but as a child the past, being my parent's past in particular, was inaccessibly distant. They may have told me stories as a child, but as a child does, I forgot them.

I did learn from them that Hitler had been evil, though Germans as a people were not. I learnt from them that fighting war was hideous, but that sometimes it had to be done. I do recall my father once saying that he was relieved that he had never had to take aim at a German soldier, pull the trigger and see him fall. My mother, stationed in London, spoke of the Blitz and her terror of the V1s with their silent descent. Neither of them, as best I can recall, ever talked about the Holocaust.

Hidden casualties of war

They survived, but both were in their way casualties of war. My mother did not have, as they would call it at the time, 'strong nerves'. The war smashed those nerves, she walked - probably drunk - in front of an army truck, and suffered injuries that would last a lifetime. My father's leukaemia, which eventually killed him, may have been caused by over-exposure to X-ray radiation in a field-hospital.

He also suffered - to my amazement as an adult to discover - from shell-shock, having come under artillery fire and being blown first from one side of a road to the other and then back again in seconds. That my seemingly emotionally impervious father could have had such a traumatic psychological experience seemed, at the time, inconceivable. Looking back it now seems to fit with a character that understood, but rarely condoned, weakness in others: he had faced breakdown and had come back, fought back, and couldn't see why or how others could fail to mend if they too were broken.

De-fascism programme, Italy

After treatment for shell-shock my father was judged not fit for active service and was posted - Italy by now having surrendered - to be the accountant of the University of Perugia, where the Allies had set up a 'de-fascism' programme for the locals. The programme was always probably superfluous, and little serious endeavour seems to have taken place.

My father moved out of barracks, and went to live with an Italian family in the town. This may have been legitimate, but I always sensed that he just did it because it's what he wanted to do and no one was inclined to stop him. He remained close to two of the women there - Wanda and Anna, whom I met in the late sixties when they came to England to visit him. There probably was romance, but there was also certainly an abiding love and respect.

Drinks rations in Italy

The Christmas he was stationed there he went to fetch the drinks ration from the QM stores. On seeing the half lorry-load of wines, beers and spirits waiting for him my father, being ever scrupulous, explained to QM stores that most of the troops had been recalled to their units. This meant there were only a few of them left, and that really they didn't need anywhere near that much alcohol. The sharp retort from QM stores of course was that according to their list there were hundreds of troops stationed there, that this was the exact ration for that many people, and would my father kindly shift his arse, and their supplies, without further demur. Which of course he did - becoming, one imagines, something of a local hero.

Food rations in Italy

My father never really learned to cook - it was, after all, in those days, partly the reason a man wanted a wife. One day his Italian family left him to prepare the midday meal, while they went to attend to the fields. There was rice to cook, which seemed simple enough - boil water, add rice, wait until done.

As the rice cooked, though, the water turned a deep and unsatisfying brown. Puzzled, my father could only stand and watch, wondering what he had overlooked. When the family returned they explained, quite patiently it seems, that a part of the necessary preparation of rice was to sift it for rats' droppings. The ruined rice was discarded, and my father never again was allowed to cook. I doubt if ever he would have turned into a 'brown rice' sort of fellow, but ever after he avoided rice of any shade or hue.

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