Rose Coote - Remembrance

I wish I’d asked my dad more, when he was alive, about his war years. When you are young, you are only interested in the gory bits. Did you kill anybody? How many people did you kill? How did you get that scar? But now I would like to know more about the everyday bits-bits of him.

Dad spent 6 years fighting in WWII after escaping Poland when Germany invaded and that is a long time in anyone’s life. We know about the big battles – Monte Casino, Tobruk, North Africa, but I assume these were short parts in the whole six years of army life. What did he do from sun-up to sun-down? Where was he? Did he like living that life which really was not a choice for him? Did he long to go back to his home and spend time on the farm or meet up with girls and have some softness to mitigate the eternal dust, drab uniforms and dry foods, which is what I imagine when I think of him in that war.

I would like to imagine a day….

He wakes up in a tent, hungover. Friends had located a farmhouse nearby and found some bottles of Italian wine in the cellar. While they drank and reminisced about their lives and told exaggerated stories of bravery and sexual conquest, they played cards and dad won a week’s worth of cigarettes, which are good bartering material.  

In imagining this day and how dull it seems, it occurs to me that Remembrance is maybe not all glamour and purpose and maybe that’s why dad didn’t speak of his life much – it was just repetition and dullness in a broken environment. To think of alternative and all the bad in inhumane things that happened is not good remembrance. And maybe that’s why he didn’t speak of it to his children.