My grandfather's war memoirs - updated

While staying with my mother, I was able to fill in a few of the missing names of people and places in my grandfather's war memoirs , and also took copies of some photographs, which I've just added to the site.
1914 aged 19, having just enlisted in the Hampshire Regiment.

1940s, serving in Egypt with the RAF.

Wednesday wound up

I’m posting this when I should really be in bed, after a jolly long and hard day’s graft on a large pile of books. Another one off to the printers today, though, so hooray for that. Still can’t quite see the daylight the other side of the mountain, but . . . Tomorrow is Another Day. Except that it’s already tomorrow, so actually, it isn’t. Another Day, that is.

Prompted to post this early-morning miscellany by a number of things:



First, just watched Spooks on BBC3 (ie next week’s BBC1 episode). It does get sillier and sillier, but I still chewed my fingernails with all the suspense. Some of which was inevitably caused by simply not knowing whether Adam (Rupert Penry-Jones) would be wearing clothes this week or, as (twice) last week (in Spooks and in Joe’s Palace) . . . not. He wore a suit and tie all the time, disappointingly, but the programme still managed to be very gripping in a slightly over-‘thrilling’ sort of way. Didn’t it used to be more subtle and low-key than this?

A Musing on Joe’s Palace , Capturing Mary and the rest of the current Poliakoff season will follow in the next day or two.

Dreadful news from North Berwick. I simply hadn’t appreciated when I was up there admiring the Bass Rock in all its sinister beauty, and havering on about gannets and things, that the rock's vast and spectacular colony of these sleek, blue-eyed birds is under very serious threat. Gannets feed their young on sand eels, but with global warming and a very slight rise in water temperature, conditions in the Scottish waters are no longer optimum for sand eels (there is a diminishing supply of their favourite plankton) so they are fast disappearing from the area. The gannets consequently feed their young on other, less nutritious fish, including pipefish, which is a similar size to the sand eel but hard for young gannets to digest. Baby gannets are simply starving to death and, in some areas off the Scottish coast, whole colonies are failing to breed. You can read all about it in this article from The Scotsman (from which I also filched the photo, but all in a good cause).

My grandfather’s wartime memories are receiving a gratifying number of hits, and some of them are coming from StoryHeart, run by personal historian Tracy Urban in Vancouver. Tracy encourages and advises people who wish to tell their own personal stories, or to record the life-stories of others and turn them into book or website form, and she has very kindly added a link to my site from hers. I shall be creating a similar kind of book out of my grandfather’s memories – probably in an edition of about a dozen, for my mother and the wider family, including my children, who were born after their great-grandfather died. Of all my grandparents, he is the one I most regret not having lived to see my children – he would have been so proud of them, and they would have adored him, too.

Finally - it's good to know that I'm not alone in believing that italic ampersands* are far more attractive and interesting than the standard 'roman' variety. There's a simple but good illustration of this over on Textwrap.

* Or les esperluettes, as I try to remember to call them in the interests of euphony and general pretentiousness.

My grandfather's war memoirs

It's been a little ongoing project of mine to transcribe the handwritten memoirs of his experiences in the First and Second World Wars that my grandfather wrote not long before his death in 1974. My intention was - and remains - to gather together not only his writings on the subject, but also a selection of photographs so that I can turn them into a short self-published book for family and friends.

I haven't finished yet, but in honour of Remembrance Day I've decided to post what I've done so far on a dedicated site, The War Memoirs of Edward Dennis Deane 1895-1974.

As I say in my (not-as-brief-as-I'd-intended) Introduction, this is not great literature - my Grandad was no undiscovered Sassoon or my family's answer to Wilfred Owen.

The most - possibly the only - notable thing about this brief document is that Private Den Deane fought in Gallipoli and at Ypres and in Italy and on the Somme . . . and survived them all.

I've been taken to task by some readers of this blog for my comments on the current war in Iraq. They spoil the light, provincial ambience of my musings and generally mark me down as an unthinking propagandist, apparently. Well here's another facet to consider - my interest in Iraq goes back further than you might think. To 1922, in fact - when my Grandfather was posted there with the RAF. It was a country that he loved, and he talked about it often, and his set of six engraved Iraqi brass egg-cups sits here in my study as I write this.

Anyway - it's all there for anyone whose thoughts this weekend, like mine, are of Remembrance.