Fathers and Sons Read online

  Granddad found himself shouldering his way through the packed carriage to the officers’ compartment.

  ‘Permission to speak, sir.’

  ‘Carry on.’

  ‘That train across there, sir…it’s full of Canadians.’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘My brothers, sir…they’re serving in a Canadian division. I haven’t seen them for–in a very long time indeed. I’d like to cut across and see if they’re on board.’

  The officers must surely have thought this boy was on a wild-goose chase but permission was granted anyway. Perhaps odds were called and bets made on whether he’d find either man.

  Meanwhile my grandfather had doubled over to the other platform. He took a deep breath and climbed on to the Canadian train.

  It was even more crowded than his own and he only had a few minutes. He began pushing down the carriages, calling their names.

  ‘Is there a Douglas or a John Madeley on board? Does anyone know a Douglas Madeley or a John Madeley…’

  When I went to see the Spielberg movie, Saving Private Ryan, I shivered at the scene where Tom Hanks pushes his way through an endless column of soldiers, calling out for a Private Ryan. I suddenly saw my grandfather as a young man forcing his way down a packed troop train in an earlier war, shouting out his brothers’ names to disinterested and preoccupied soldiers.

  Still he pressed on, refusing to give up hope.

  He found Douglas and John sitting together in the same carriage.

  I don’t know how he would have recognised them. Perhaps he had been sent a recent photograph; perhaps their faces were still discernibly those of the boys who had slipped away from him in the night so many years before. Perhaps another soldier simply pointed them out.

  But it was an electrifying encounter. Geoffrey was looking into the eyes of his dear brothers, faces he had not seen for ten long and lonely years. They stared back, dumbfounded, at their lost brother, who they remembered as a little boy and who was now a strapping young man of twenty in uniform. An incredible coincidence had reunited them as they were all poised to plunge into the whitest heat of war.

  It must have seemed like a miracle.

  Perhaps it was.

  The Madeley brothers knew the chances all three would emerge unscathed from France were slim. But they would have made no mention of that. Their hurried, snatched conversation (how strange Douglas and John’s Canadian accents must have sounded to Geoffrey!) ended with promises to write and, God willing, perhaps meet in France. Then my grandfather had to go. His train was leaving, and he walked back to it in a daze.

  A reunion in such extraordinary, unlooked-for circumstances is unthinkable in today’s world where we can all track each other’s movements through multiple lines of communication–mobile phones, emails, Facebook. But ninety-odd years ago, in the wartime bustle of a railway station in the Midlands, my grandfather found his brothers thanks to a sudden dart of almost animal instinct that had whispered to him they were close at hand. I have never believed it was simply an incredible coincidence; I think he felt their presence, somehow picked up a metaphysical signal and followed it to its source.

  He never saw Douglas again. The eldest Madeley boy went into action a few weeks later in the Canadian Corp’s assault on Vimy Ridge. This pimple of land in the Nord Pas de Calais region was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting of the war. Douglas was killed on the first day. John also took part in the battle, but survived.

  Douglas Madeley lies somewhere near Vimy Ridge. His name is carved on the Canadian war memorial there. It is all that is left of him.

  My grandfather was a typical veteran of the Great War in that he rarely spoke about what it was like to be at the centre of the bloodiest conflict in history. Like the huge majority of men who survived the carnage, he came home and refused to talk about it. But much later, in old age, one or two stories slipped out.

  One recalled a ferocious German assault barely held off by his trench, the attackers surging so close to his position that he could see every detail of their faces as they fell to his platoon’s frantic rifle-fire. Afterwards, my grandfather stared in disbelief at the shreds of skin smoking and peeling from his right hand; the bolt of his Lee–Enfield .303 had become almost red-hot during the intense firing. He couldn’t understand why the mechanism hadn’t jammed.

  Then there was the sight of a comrade, one arm cleanly shot off by a burst of machine-gun fire, running in tight circles, screaming, before collapsing in death.

  One especially vivid glimpse into hell took place on a warm summer’s afternoon when Granddad was sent with a message to the field hospital. When he got there he heard peculiar growling noises coming from behind a tent. Curious, he went to see what it was.

  Four or five men were suspended, upside down, from meat hooks clipped to a metal A-frame. They were in the last stages of lockjaw–tetanus–and as their spines arched in the agonising death throes, medics thought some small relief could be found by inverting them.

  Within days of arriving at the British trenches near Rouen, Granddad, like everyone else, was lousy. When the parasites weren’t dining on their host, they would hide in the seams of the men’s uniforms. The soldiers who’d been out there for a while showed the boy from Shropshire how to de-louse clothing, passing the flame of a candle smoothly along the stitching, paying special attention to the backs of collars. On cold nights nobody wanted to take off their tunic, and the men would help each other burn lice off the backs of their uniforms.

  When I was about fifteen I once asked my grandfather if, as a young man barely twenty, he had been afraid of dying. Actually, I didn’t. By then I had learned that direct questions about his experiences in the trenches never got a reply; one had to pose them as more thoughtful musings. I said something like: ‘I expect a lot of you–especially the younger ones–would have been very shocked and afraid. One minute you were safe in England, the next you were in the lines, fighting for your lives.’

  After the long pause that always followed such not-so-subtle attempts to get him to describe his experiences, he answered: ‘Well, you see…we didn’t really talk about all that. No point. I think there was a silly song at the time, “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here.” Something like that. Everyone was in the same boat and you just had to get on with things and do your best…knowing it was the same for everyone was a sort of help.’

  And beyond this handful of stories and comments, my grandfather’s war withdraws itself into a privacy. Except for this postscript. After he had told me about the men dying of tetanus, I asked another question–one too many, I think, although there was no reproach in my grandfather’s eyes as he looked steadily into mine. I can clearly remember the scene: we were standing in a glade in an autumnal Epping Forest, foraging for sweet chestnuts. Finally he spoke. ‘Believe me, Richard…that was nothing like the worst of it.’

  God knows what appalling secrets my grandfather–and millions like him–kept locked inside their heads. Some literally went mad, others withdrew into an interior world for the rest of their lives. Granddad probably saw himself as a survivor. He had managed to absorb the crushing fate of being abandoned as a child, and had long ago determined his own strategy to reverse it, a strategy fully in place as he prepared to head home after the armistice in late 1918, more or less in one piece. He had lost part of one foot, from a machine-gun burst, and would be permanently deaf in one ear after a shell landed close to his trench. Both wounds were more or less hidden disabilities: his one good ear allowed him to continue to appreciate music, although years later the arrival of stereo hi-fi would be of little interest to him; the damage to his foot was mitigated by careful scissorwork to his shoes, home-made incisions in the leather that eased the pressure on his scars. He managed to walk without a limp.

  But he was twenty-one and at last the master of his own destiny. He now had more than enough money to pay his own way to Canada and rejoin his family. No one and nothing could stop him.<
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  The British Army had other ideas.

  My grandfather was sent to Ireland to fight the IRA. He had absolutely no interest in joining another shooting match after somehow surviving the Western Front, and bitterly resented his new posting.

  Ireland was in turmoil. After the failure of the uprising in 1916, elections two years later saw the establishment of the Dail Eireann–the first underground Irish Parliament. By the time Geoffrey’s troop ship was crossing the Irish Sea, the war of independence was in full flow. It would be another two years before the Anglo-Irish Treaty recognised partition.

  The reluctant soldier wanted to be in Ontario, not the Emerald Isle. Granddad chafed at the dreary routine of guard duty and patrol, and constantly badgered his superiors to find out when he would get his discharge papers. Later that same year, 1919, he was told. And with that he had to be content.

  Weeks and months passed with agonising slowness, but at last the day came. It was to be a Sunday. My grandfather’s final assignment for King and Country would be the weekly Church Parade. He wound on his puttees for the last time and marched with the others down the main street of the little town they garrisoned. After morning service they went as usual into the wooden hut next to the church to take tea and cakes, served by the staunchly pro-British local ladies. On this last Sunday, as Granddad said his goodbyes to the smiling women, he suddenly felt deeply uneasy. He couldn’t work out what it was, but something was definitely not right.

  He went outside, lit a cigarette, and tried to think. Then it came to him. All morning, he realised, ever since leaving barracks, he’d had a sense of being secretly watched. He couldn’t explain it and later, as he packed his kit, handed in his rifle and ran to catch the boat train to England, he forgot all about it. He was done with the army and the army was done with him. Soon he would be travelling a lot further than France or Ireland.

  My grandfather never claimed he’d had some kind of premonition that his friends would shortly be gunned down in cold blood. Later, he thought some kind of sixth sense had whispered to him that day. He believed that an IRA reconnaissance unit had probably been keeping them under surveillance as they marched to and from church, and he had been subconsciously aware of it.

  A few weeks later, Church Parade was far from routine. As Granddad’s mates marched into town, they were walking towards ambush and death. The IRA had set up a machine gun in the hedge opposite the church. They waited patiently for the British to move well into range. Then they delivered their savage rebuke to the hated occupiers.

  If my grandfather had spent many more days in the army, they would probably have been his last on earth.

  Geoffrey settled his affairs in Shawbury and in September 1919, nearly eighteen months behind schedule thanks to a combination of the Kaiser and the IRA, he finally boarded a ship bound for Canada. It was a departure touched with sadness. He and his Aunt Sarah had become very close over the years. He appreciated the way she had tried to console him in the terrible months after he was left behind, and she had been a quiet but staunch ally in his determination to leave Kiln Farm and find his family again.

  Sarah had been sick with anxiety while Geoffrey was serving in France. Soldiers who came back alive from the trenches were precious, almost hallowed beings and it must have grieved her greatly to see him leave again so soon. But she knew he had to go.

  My grandfather’s emotions can only be imagined as his ship nosed into the Western Approaches–so recently a hunting ground for German U-boats preying on Allied shipping as it neared British waters–and set course for Canada. He was, he realised, sailing across a wide ocean towards a deeply uncertain future. There had been very little communication with his parents in the years after they left. They had, of course, written to let him know that his eldest brother had been killed in France. Changes of address, too, were notified.

  Such desultory correspondence was not particularly unusual in those days. But it meant my grandfather really only knew his family from fading memories, memories which were frozen in the year 1907. There had been the extraordinary encounter with Douglas and John in 1917, but this had been more of an emotional electric shock than a reunion.

  It was one thing to dream rosy dreams of reconciliation and rapprochement. As the liner drew inexorably closer to the mouth of the St Lawrence River, Geoffrey realised he was about to confront a group of near-strangers.

  What a strange voyage it must have been for the young man. As the days passed, how he must have rehearsed what he was going to say to them all. The last time he had addressed his mother and father, he had been a little boy, and they had spoken to him as a child. What would they make of this tall Englishman when he walked into their home? What would he make of them? If they had some kind of disagreement or falling out, would he find hot words of suppressed anger and recrimination rising, unbidden, to his lips?

  He was probably the most preoccupied passenger on board.

  Henry and his family had put down roots in the little town of St Thomas, close to the shores of Lake Erie and at the heart of the Great Lakes Peninsula. It could hardly have been more different from Worcester, or Shropshire, come to that. This was tobacco-growing country, surprisingly hot and humid in summer, but true to the stereotypical image of Canada in winter when thick snow blanketed the ground for months.

  Granddad must have written to let them know he was coming, or perhaps sent a telegram. He would not have arrived unexpectedly. But he had, at last, arrived. A journey twelve years in the making, and thousands of miles in the travelling, was done.

  A series of trains and buses brought him to St Thomas and the address his family had been living at for the last few years. He stood stock-still outside the simple frame-built house on a quiet street and stared at the front door. It represented the last remaining barrier between him and his family. The emotional weight of that moment must have been colossal. Finally he stepped forward, and knocked.

  A pause. Then steps approaching from the other side; a woman’s tread. The handle rattling and turning; the door swinging open.

  Geoffrey looked into the eyes of a middle-aged woman.

  His eyes.

  Her eyes.

  His mother’s eyes.

  She stared at him, and slowly shook her head. ‘Oh…I’m so sorry…I truly am sorry…I never buy anything at the door.’ She closed it in his face.

  The last exchange of photographs across the Atlantic had obviously failed to imprint my grandfather’s mature features on his mother’s memory. In her mind’s eye she still saw him as the little boy she had last seen twelve years earlier.

  Geoffrey had sometimes wondered if he would recognise his parents when he saw them again. It never crossed his mind that they might not recognise him.

  He didn’t know what to do. None of his fantasies about this moment had included this scenario. Eventually, he knocked again.

  Now the woman looked annoyed. He spoke quickly, before she could send him away a second time.

  ‘It’s me, Mother. I’m your son. I’m Geoffrey.’

  Slowly, Hannah saw the man standing on her doorstep as the boy she once knew. Her eyes widened and she put her hands to her mouth.

  ‘Mother…are you all r–’

  ‘Geoffrey…oh, Geoffrey!’

  Her child had crossed the years, a war, and an ocean to come home to her. He had come home to her.

  My grandfather moved in with his family that same afternoon. The coming days were utterly, blissfully happy. He was ‘home’. But unlike the return of the prodigal son, this was the homecoming of a young man to the prodigal parents. Forgiveness could only flow one way–from him to them.

  What mature, unbounded forgiveness it was! Henry and Hannah must have been profoundly grateful (and secretly not a little relieved) to find the boy they left behind so apparently free of anger. Geoffrey had every right to ask about what had been done to him and why, but he had not made his journey to deliver judgement or apportion blame. Long ago he had decided to try to under
stand his father’s great dilemma of 1907. It would be pointless now to condemn Henry’s solution to it; Geoffrey’s betrayal could never be undone. But it could be healed.

  And it was. Despite the passing of the years, the Madeleys were still a relatively young family. The death of Douglas at twenty-five on Vimy Ridge left Henry and Hannah with six children; five siblings for Geoffrey to get to know again. Baby Cyril was now twelve; Katherine was fifteen, William seventeen, Doris twenty, and John, the surviving eldest, twenty-five. They welcomed my grandfather back with open arms and open hearts. He felt reborn.

  Granddad spent his first months in Canada earning dollars to go travelling. He picked up some casual labour on the tobacco farms and in local factories, and stayed with his parents and siblings. There was a lot of catching up to do, not least with his brother John about their experiences in France. But as my grandfather said many years later, there was ‘no need to rush things’. By the late summer of 1920 the long-severed connection with his family was almost fully restored. He felt confident and relaxed enough to tell them that he was heading off for a while.

  The harvest season had arrived. Geoffrey decided to use his farming skills to freelance his way west, working as casual labour until he reached the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean beyond. He began by fruit-picking on Ontario’s farms, then crossed into Manitoba to help bring in the wheat. He did the same in the great dust bowl of Saskatchewan–Canada’s Kansas–and by autumn’s end he had reached Calgary in Alberta, and the foothills of the Rockies.

  At some point along the way, he met The Girl.

  The Girl. Of all the figures in my grandfather’s past, it is she who remains the most elusive, and yet she would have a profound bearing on the rest of his life.

  Who was she? My father only knew that she was the first woman his father fell in love with, that Geoffrey asked her to marry him, and that she had said ‘yes’. She was around his own age, in her early twenties. A lifetime later he would tell my young mother that The Girl was the most beautiful creature he had ever set eyes on. But he would lose her as surely as he had lost his family years before–only this time, for good. Why?