My grandfather was 22 years old when he landed at Pegasus Bridge, in what is celebrated as an heroic act of war. I wonder if he would ever have considered it bravery, to follow orders and carry out his duty, because when I knew him, he was always very much about doing things properly.
I’ve stared at this screen for quite a while now, thinking of all the things I could write about him, but there are so many conflicting stories. To begin with, there are at least three different versions of how he came to be known as Bumpy.
He died in 1989, so I only knew him from a child’s point of view. He had two main roles: big Father Christmas-like friendly grandfather, with his bedtime stories and apparently encyclopaedic knowledge of everything; and scary, red-faced blustering angry grandfather, who we tended to hide from. He showed us the night sky through a telescope, carved walking sticks from twisted pieces of rhododendron, and shouted at Granny for burning the toast.
As you grow up, you start to understand things, and the adults stop disguising the facts so much, and your family history starts to sound as dark and mixed up as a russian novel. At his funeral, Granny acknowledged that he had made her life hard; but without him she was lost like a butterfly in the mist.
I wish I knew what had happened, or not happened, since that crash-landing in Normandy sixty years ago, to make him so angry; was it because he wanted a glorious career, to live the life of an officer, but never quite lived up to his wife’s family name; or because he wanted to raise a family of rugby-playing boys, and only managed three girls and a boy with Down’s Syndrome who had to be hidden away in a home. He certainly would never have approved of my life.
Or maybe it was the hideousness of war that scarred him deep inside. Maybe he could never quite respect people around him who hadn’t seen the things that he had seen in his early twenties before his life was really formed. Perhaps he was impatient with a world that did not appreciate what he had done to preserve its freedom.