Grandfathers

I know today is Father's Day. A day to celebrate fathers. And that can get mighty tricky for some, for most of us because no one has a perfect father and there are always issues..... some huge, some small.....Today thinking about my dad is too hard. Suddenly I miss him painfully all over again, as if he died only yesterday and not eight months ago. To much to deal with just right now.

Instead I ask my mother about her Dad. He died when I was eleven and I have a child's delighted happy memories of him. Especially of him teasing my mum by pretending not to know where I had got to and actually having me hidden in the knee hole of his desk, or behind his footstool. His celebratory chuckle remains vivid in my memory. He loved books and introduced me to the wonderful world of written words by reading Babar stories to me in his comfortable Scottish burr that didn't fade for all the years he lived in Africa. She tells me he was generous and kindhearted and always played Father Christmas at the local Christmas party. She tells me he was a perfectionist who could be hard to deal with. She tells me, something I didn't know, that like my own Dad he died suddenly and unexpectedly.

I think about having missed out on knowing him, and with gratitude that I knew my other grandfather who died when I was twenty five, and who I lived with at the time of his death. He also was funny, and loved to tease in a kind way. I have learned much about him from going through stuff of my dad's - things I also didn't know. Like how he was retired early by the American Copper Mining company he worked for as he was encouraging the black workforce to form unions. Much frowned upon in the 1940's and early 1950's in colonial Africa.

When I think about  both of them I realise how lucky I am to be here.

Both fought and survived the First World War.

My maternal grandfather ran away to war at age 17 in September 1914, and fought all the way through the war on the Western Front with only minor injuries. It seems remarkable when so many millions died that anyone would live, especially when you consider that he was Mentioned-in-Despatches more than once and won the Military Cross. He wasn't tucked away somewhere safe. He fought with  the Scots Guards in the thick of it.

My paternal grandfather fought in German East Africa. An entirely different kind of war to the trenches in Europe. But brutal none the less. Brutal in an entirely African kind of way. He contracted Blackwater Fever (a deadly form of malaria usually) and dysentery and typhoid. They should have killed him but they didn't. Amazing to think that he lived to be 92 after all that.

Both though, were scarred by the war for both fled into the interior of Africa and never went home to Scotland or the Cape Province of South Africa again. For some years they lived solitary lives farming in remote bush or prospecting. Both then married women much younger than themselves. Both became kind, generous and humorous men in their later lives and seemed somehow to put the awfulness of the war behind them without therapy or dragging after effects.

Neither were well known or famous or celebrities, yet they lived ordinary lives that nonetheless deserve honour and respect and to be remembered with love and fondness.

And without them doing that, well I would not be here to live my own life......... I pray that I will live as well as they did.