Kathy’s story. Anne King

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I looked at the old blokes, and all of a sudden, I understood my old man. It was as if he was standing there with me. He had died two days before; there’s no doubt he was on my mind, but this day was like a gift from him, to make me understand – himself, men and war, humanity, the whole goddamn thing.

It was a cold rainy April day, 1998. I was stuck in town watching an Anzac Parade, not through choice, I just couldn’t move till the main street was clear.

At once I was struck by how few old diggers there were, only a handful of men and the brass band, frail and elderly, but proudly striding out as best they could. At the rear a guy about my own age, forty-five or thereabouts, marched along. His face showed he had been through a lot, and he was trying to hold himself together and get through this march as though it was a hurdle he had to overcome for the sake of his sanity, or his soul. Across the road a smartly dressed man of similar age was watching the Vietnam vet. intently. He stepped forward and put his hand on the vet’s creased and shabby suit, ‘Good on yer mate’ , he said, “I wish I’d marched too.”

To my surprise I was very moved by the little procession. I’d never had much time for Anzac celebrations, I thought it was men’s chest-beating and didn’t really approve. But when the old guy making the speech read out a letter from an 18 year old in the first world war to his mother about his terrible fear and his certainty that he would die tomorrow; when he touched his heart, and said ‘ Lest we forget’, it came to me in a flash what this ceremony was all about, and I realized these old men were not warmongers, as I’d thought, they were the only ones left from the group that had gone to war at 17 or 18 and watched their dear friends die before their eyes. It was about remembering these young men, who’d never had the chance to live out their lives.

I thought immediately of my own sons, now at that very age themselves. Of how I would feel if they had to go off to war. Then I thought of my dear old Dad, who had joined up at 17 for his own war.

We’d never really been close Dad and I, though we made an effort, and I’d always admired him. He was a working class man from Yorkshire, who had made something of himself. He was always positive, and when he was captured at Dunkirk and ended up in a German prisoner-of-war camp, it was full of educated men who were hanging around with nothing to do. He said to himself ‘I’m going to treat this like a university and educate myself.’ By the time he got back to Yorkshire five years later he could speak fluent French and German, could knock out a tune on the saxophone and several other musical instruments, had gained confidence acting and singing in the productions put on in the camps, and had become articulate and organized by sitting on many committees. He had read literature that he would never have come across before, having left school at 14 to go out to work.

He had seen many friends die though, both before and then in the prison camp, and when he came home there was a deep hidden anger inside him that would flare up from time to time for the rest of his life. Mum told me he was a changed man, that anger had not been there before he went away, but we kids only knew what we saw, and I was a bit afraid of him.

Standing there in the rain, my understanding of Dad came to me as a revelation. It was as though I was inside his head, and heard his thoughts as a young man, felt his pain. Quaked with that same terror he must have felt as an 18 year old facing gunfire. Suffered the resentment and anguish on his return home, having left his youth behind in a prison camp.

‘Lest we Forget’, and I saw again the Vietnam veteran, my own age, still suffering emotionally from his war, and from the rejection when he returned. Had my father still suffered on at fifty? ‘Lest we Forget”, and I saw again how many families must have wept watching their young boys go off to war, and coming home maimed in body and mind, if they came home at all.

‘Lest we Forget’, the old guy said, with his hand on his heart. Those words made a massive imprint on my soul. I felt connected with all these men, past and present, who were remembering their lost young friends. I became one of the women who had watched them go off to war. In my heart at that moment I stopped judging my father, and truly accepted him and loved him for who he was.

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