Yesterday I did some nosing around on the internet regarding my Mum's cousin. He was a rear gunner in a Halifax that was shot down in May 1943 over Holland. When I was growing up my mother occasionally spoke of him as she remembered meeting him during the war (he grew up in west London & mother in south Wales) when he was in uniform she was eleven when he was killed aged twenty-two.
As I ferreted around I followed leads from the website of 51 Squadron that was based at Snaith near York. I found out the number of the aircraft he was in DT645 and searched for that and I came across this:
http://www.aircrewremembered.com/smith-watson-david.html
My mothers cousin is Sgt WJ Merrigan and from what I recall he was the tail-gunner on this Halifax. Bearing that in mind it dawned on me as I read that there was the very real possibility that as the plane was shot from the rear he was the first to die and was spared the horror of being in a plane out of control and heading for the ground at a rate of knots.
I then read about the pilot who shot his plane down - well he was certainly no amateur as this was his 25th kill and he had survived the Battle of Britain. Then I read on and found that he himself was dead the very next day! The next bit certainly surprised me - instead of thinking 'Serves him right the $#%£&*@ for killing a member of my family.' My thought was simply he was doing a job in the same way that my mothers cousin who was twenty-two was doing a job, he was thirty-three - no age really for either of them, I just felt sad that these people died as a result of one small group of lunatics who wanted to rule the world and they were nothing more than bystanders caught up in it.
Friday, 25 September 2015
Saturday, 5 September 2015
Childhood Horse-Shit Trauma.
Way back in the 1970's when stuff used to work when the country wasn't on strike or in the dark and things had colour schemes were based on pools of sick - I was a child growing up in Swansea. Swansea in itself is a shit-hole, it always has been and always will be, in fact when the Luftwaffe started bombing it from 19th Feb 1941, they stopped after three nights when they realised they could not manage to make the place any worse and decided to drop their bombs on somewhere more deserving.
Back to my childhood - well I say childhood, I was legally a child and my dufflecoat had a hood that was permanently up as it was Wales and it rained a lot. It was more of a forced apprenticeship for small people who had no choice as far as my parents were concerned. One of the many things I was forced to do apart from mixing cement from the age of three, was every year (usually around Feb/March time) we would have a trip to the Gower to collect sack-loads of horse-shit for the garden. Rarely would we go to the Gower in the summer as it was full of tourists and my family didn't want to part with any money to park the car at Oxwich, Langland or Caswell - or anywhere else for that matter. In any case why waste valuable concrete mixing time when the weather was so good as making the house and garden look like Soviet Russia would never happen whilst we were playing on the sand or paddling!
Back to the sack-loads of horse-shit. Every year as soon as one Saturday would offer the chance of light drizzle or even no rain we would all be loaded into the car (a Ford Corsair V6 which regularly conked out) along with a various plastic sacks and Mam would bring a picnic which was ideal for eating in the freezing cold and wet with the ever present pong of horse-shit everywhere! It was only made worse by the horrors that always will be the taste of tepid tea out of a flask, there are few things more vile! We would be there for hours, sometimes until it started to get dark, filling sacks with horse-shit and struggling with them to the car - if only the NSPCC had known! The boot would be so full that the back end of the car was distinctly lower than the rest of it and on every occasion it was so full that my sister and I would have a few sacks of the stuff between us to stop us squabbling. Frankly even now I still prefer spending time with a sack of horse-shit than my sister. However a row always broke out when my Dad tried to get Mam to carry a sack-load on her lap. Then when we got home we'd have to barrow the vile stuff to the non-concreted part of the garden, aka the veg plot (which would have fed most of the street every year).
Once this ordeal was over all clothes would be removed and instead of being burnt as they deserved were washed and we were put in the bath. It is hardly surprising that at school I found it difficult as I was probably ponging like a heaven knows what! I still break out in a cold sweat whenever I walk past the mounted horse-guards on Whitehall as when we went there one particularly hot summer in the 70's all I remember seeing was a massive pile of horse-shit the associated cloud of flies and the look in my Dad's eye that said 'If only I had a few plastic sacks and a shovel.'
Back to my childhood - well I say childhood, I was legally a child and my dufflecoat had a hood that was permanently up as it was Wales and it rained a lot. It was more of a forced apprenticeship for small people who had no choice as far as my parents were concerned. One of the many things I was forced to do apart from mixing cement from the age of three, was every year (usually around Feb/March time) we would have a trip to the Gower to collect sack-loads of horse-shit for the garden. Rarely would we go to the Gower in the summer as it was full of tourists and my family didn't want to part with any money to park the car at Oxwich, Langland or Caswell - or anywhere else for that matter. In any case why waste valuable concrete mixing time when the weather was so good as making the house and garden look like Soviet Russia would never happen whilst we were playing on the sand or paddling!
Back to the sack-loads of horse-shit. Every year as soon as one Saturday would offer the chance of light drizzle or even no rain we would all be loaded into the car (a Ford Corsair V6 which regularly conked out) along with a various plastic sacks and Mam would bring a picnic which was ideal for eating in the freezing cold and wet with the ever present pong of horse-shit everywhere! It was only made worse by the horrors that always will be the taste of tepid tea out of a flask, there are few things more vile! We would be there for hours, sometimes until it started to get dark, filling sacks with horse-shit and struggling with them to the car - if only the NSPCC had known! The boot would be so full that the back end of the car was distinctly lower than the rest of it and on every occasion it was so full that my sister and I would have a few sacks of the stuff between us to stop us squabbling. Frankly even now I still prefer spending time with a sack of horse-shit than my sister. However a row always broke out when my Dad tried to get Mam to carry a sack-load on her lap. Then when we got home we'd have to barrow the vile stuff to the non-concreted part of the garden, aka the veg plot (which would have fed most of the street every year).
Once this ordeal was over all clothes would be removed and instead of being burnt as they deserved were washed and we were put in the bath. It is hardly surprising that at school I found it difficult as I was probably ponging like a heaven knows what! I still break out in a cold sweat whenever I walk past the mounted horse-guards on Whitehall as when we went there one particularly hot summer in the 70's all I remember seeing was a massive pile of horse-shit the associated cloud of flies and the look in my Dad's eye that said 'If only I had a few plastic sacks and a shovel.'
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)