Arthur

This is Arthur, my grandfather, newly commissioned around 1939. Six ft tall, handsome, newly married, serious, kind, a lover of nature. I only knew him as a child, a quiet, troubled man who would smoke cigarettes in the garage of his tiny house in Bickley, sipping surreptitiously from the bottle of vodka he kept there.

He was lovely to me, his first grandchild, gentle and calm. He would buy me sweets and read me stories - but I never knew what horrors he had endured. Later, when I was in my early twenties, and shortly before he died from alcohol-related problems, I would visit him and he would slip me a fiver, asking me to buy him a forbidden bottle from the off-licence. I saw him then as a pathetic figure, in the grip of the drink, unable to function. I wish I had had the intelligence and the foresight to understand him better.

Five years after that photograph was taken, he emerged from the Burmese jungle, weighing about 8 stone and riddled with every tropical disease you could think of. My uncle still has the sword of the Japanese officer who came at him, intending to slice off his head. He shot him at point blank range, but he later told my uncle that ‘he came at me, every night, for years’.

He rarely spoke about his war. But one night, he unburdened himself to my uncle. There were heartbreaking tales of young friends and revered superiors being killed beside him in the bloody campaigns of Dunkirk, Crete and Tobruk, but it was when talking about Burma that he started to stumble and stammer. In common with so many others from that terrible campaign, Arthur, it turned out, had had to do the worst thing an officer ever has to do behind enemy lines: he had killed some of his own men, as an act of kindness, because they were too sick or wounded to carry on and no one wanted to end up in the hands of the Japanese.

‘I did some things you shouldn’t have to do,’ he said haltingly to my uncle. ‘Nobody can understand.’ He drank hard to silence the memories, and eventually drank himself to death.

The only inkling I ever had of his pain was when once, visiting us in Italy, I woke in the middle of the night to find him pacing wildly, mumbling about ‘dark forces’ that were coming to get us. His intensity was frightening, the lost look in his eyes unfathomable. I’m ashamed to say I never understood. And I don’t think anyone really did.

I raise a glass to you, Arthur, on this 80th anniversary of VJ Day. And I thank you now, in your grave, for your inestimable sacrifice.