It was a few weeks into autumn and I hadn’t had a hair cut since before the summer solstice. My beard, long and straggly and in desperate need of trimming, was a week away from having birds nest in it. I unpolished my boots and wore some old jeans that were ripped at the knees and dirty from digging a deep hole on a particularly wet day in Highgate Cemetery. Hanging loosely over the top of those was a baggy grey jumper I spilt half a bottle of bleach over about three years ago. I looked a bit of a state, but there was a method to my madness. Today was the day I was going to ask Moon for a pay rise and I wanted to look as if I’d been trod on. On the morning I was due to ask him, my bike got a puncture not twenty yards down the road from my house. It wasn’t a polite slow puncture so that I might finish my journey on a squidgy but rideable front tyre; the thorn tore through that poor inner tube like a javelin through jelly and it had me riding on a stee...
Fascinating stuff, Tom! Was your grandfather in the Glosters? Were the Hiroshima pictures his own and, if so, did he serve in WWII also?
ReplyDeleteI used to know an ex-Major ( sadly gone now ) who fought at the Battle Of Imjin River in Korea, where the Gloucester Regiment made a brave stand against overwhelming Chinese forces. He was captured and tortured but still maintained his enthusiasm for the army in the years after his military service. They were made of strong stuff in those days!
Hi Simon. No one really knows much about his time in Korea. It obviously had a great impact on him as he promised to name his first son Kim after (it is assumed) someone he met out there. His first son was my dad. Granddad was too young to serve in WWII so, again, I assume the photos that appear in his scrap book were given to him by fellow soldiers who had. Apparently he was part of The Welch Regiment rather than The Royal Welch Fusiliers, two army regiments posted there. A grainy picture of my Granddad's cap badge in one of the pictures would seem to corroborate this.
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