Page 550 , Ladies and Gentlemen, my next guest is...

We are in the final furlongs now. Tomorrow will see the white whale vanquished!

I had an email from MG this morning. I think that it's worth more than any comments a facetious and lame-brain penguin could make so I've just done a copy and paste job of the exchange..........

"Hi Penguin

Can I ask a favour? I want to hijack your blog for a day. It doesn't seem worth it to set up my own just for one post. Let me know?"

Why?

"I've just re-read your little piece about Havelock. You know you have my sympathy because I've already told you but reading it again made me think about something which I don't think I really understood before. My father died on a Monday morning. By Wednesday, with the paperwork completed and a funeral arranged, I was back at work. The funeral was still 6 days away.

Now you know I'm not that religious :) and I have avoided funerals all my life. I just thought they were excuses for a lot of wallowing in self-pity by the survivors and an excuse to resurrect long dead family feuds and grievances. I was in the pub on Wednesday lunchtime, with a couple of commiserating colleagues, when another colleague came in. Middle class pompous ass, but I was feeling generous :) "Are you going to deliver the eulogy?" asks the mcpa. "What?" "You know, the speech about their life etc."

I knew such things were done but it had not even entered my head. How do you write something like that? I hadn't a clue. That night I went home, sat in front of my computer and waited for something to happen. About 5 minutes later, something did and a stream of consciousness poured out. For about two hours. At the end of it, I had something, a first draft, but something nonetheless (and a very wet keyboard). I spent the next two evenings rewriting and rewriting and, at the end of it, believed I had something I would be proud to read at his funeral. And then I had a thought.

What was my mother going to think about paragraph 4? Now my mother isn't in any way religious but she has that strange respect for religion (well at least C of E), that some older people have, for what it's seemly and proper to do or say in its presence. Was I going to be able to get away with talking about it. Would she get embarrassed? Paragraph 4. My father. The hijacker! After much mental to-ing and fro-ing in my mind, I deleted it and over time the trash got emptied.

Every so often, I kind of rewrite that eulogy in different ways. I thought it was just about dealing with the grief when it wells up for whatever reason, empathy attack, something bad happens, they just tap you on the shoulder and whisper, "remember me?" but re-reading your post made me think that maybe there's another, more important reason. Deleting that part of the eulogy was one of my great mistakes and I've made a few, believe me! It so encapsulated the man that it should have stayed in. So I would like to make amends if I may. It will not be the same as was written all those years ago and is no doubt longer (for many reasons) but in essence, I think, it remains the same."

Of course!

"I have no idea whether my father was conscripted or enlisted in the army (just one more question I never asked) but sometime in late 1941 or early 1942 he was on board ship which had just set sail en route to Singapore. By the time they reached the Indian Ocean, Singapore had fallen to the Japanese and the convoy was re-routed to India, at that time part of the British Empire.

In peacetime, my father had been a Heavy Goods Vehicle driver, delivering soft drinks for Schweppes in very long articulated lorries/trucks, flat beds I think they call them. His skills therefore made him ideal for driving tank transporters which are very similar. These were used to transport damaged or broken down tanks back from the front and also to move them around at less cost.

Nothing much happened for about 2 years. They all just sat on their heels and played cards presumably. For them, there was no war, just rumours coming up from Burma. India is after all a big place! Now, they say, the better the army, the worse the food and at the time the British Army was good, very good! Add to that the problems the British always have in foreign, especially tropical, climes and you can imagine that it was an uncomfortable time for all concerned. Later mere mention of the word 'curry' was sufficient to turn my father green.

At some point late into the war but prior, I think, to the first push back into Burma to reclaim what had been lost, some Americans arrived, very well supplied. It all seemed so unfair to the British. In comparison to the British, the Americans were eating like lords! (Although I doubt the Americans thought so) After he'd been made Corporal, he hit upon a cunning plan to improve his company's lot.

He managed to subvert someone in the American camp. I do not know how. He would then be notified when a convoy of food or supplies etc was expected at the camp. He would take his transporter and another, both loaded with a tank and proceed to a narrow road, usually on a hill or mountain, that was on the route of that particular convoy. They had been there 2 years. They knew the surrounding area like the proverbial.

One transporter would be parked askew across the road, the tank demounted also onto the road, and one or more wheels removed from the transporter. The road would be absolutely impassable except on foot. My father's vehicle would be parked someways back down the road, would be made to look like it too had broken down, but it was somewhere where it could be passed by the convoy.

The convoy would pass and some minutes later, my father's vehicle would be 'fixed' and he would drive off after the convoy. Of course, it's easy to see what would happen next. The convoy has to stop, on a narrow road, and my father has come up behind them. The Americans were trapped! Neither forwards nor back. It was often the case that American truck crews would go forward to help 'repair' the transporter ahead. This was the cue for the British squaddies, hiding in the tank on my father's vehicle, to silently remove everything they could from the last truck in the convey and hide it in the tank, or secrete it onto the flat bed somewhere. At some point my father would saunter up to the lead transporter, offer his experience, everything would be 'fixed' and off everyone went to their respective camps. To the best of my knowledge, he repeated this a number of times.

What they had, and how much, determined how far it could be spread outside the immediate company. But, and this is the important thing for me, at no time did money change hands. Not one sou did my father ask for or make from his little 'enterprise'. Some time later the British Army latched onto what he'd been doing and, as the responsible NCO, in both senses, busted him back to private! They reversed that decision sometime later so he started it all back up again, although it didn't last long as they were back on the assault shortly after.

This sounds quite an insignificant thing in a way but it does, in a single episode, pretty much sum him up. Resourceful, altruistic, caring of the people around him and, best of all, up for anything 'just for the craic'! I cannot imagine a better type of father to have.

The original eulogy ended with:

'You have earlier heard the 23rd Psalm. George Herbert, a 17th century poet and clergyman, put a part of the opening lines thus: "While he is mine and I am his, what can I want or need?" I am my father's son, what more could I possibly want or need.'

Still true, I think."

The penguin will, actually, make one comment. A long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away? Cue music?:) MG had a little rant to me about his mother giving away his late father's war medals to his niece's young son. He does, with some justification, believe they are heirlooms for him and they are lost to him now, forever. But it's a bit late now, so........ In the same email he mentioned a diary his father started when they went back on the offensive in SE Asia and how he hoped that she had kept at least that and the newspaper clipping. The clipping is merely a photograph of his father in Burma playing 'Mother Goose' to a tank as it's winched onto the flat bed. The diary has relatively few entries, a few weeks at most. Mostly mundane things. The final entry is a note that his company had been ambushed by the Japanese and '....(I) had to bayonet a Jap in the eye'.

I think I too might stop this blog after something like that. We live, by and large, in privileged times. Oft times we are apt to forget this, I think.