Grandfather

 

My maternal grandfather, Charles Hulme, went to the Great War. The silver teaspoons from Beaulieu and Ypres gleam in the family cabinet.  He was a machine-gunner, and I was often told as a child that most machine-gunners survived the War for the simple reason they were protected by the gun shield. He’d say he was only wounded once, when he cut himself in the mess with a tin-opener. This story is family folklore. One can only imagine the things he must have seen with his own eyes. Charlie hated war and never talked about what he really saw. He rarely mentioned the brother who was killed in 1917; the loss was important to his silence. The War was not a point of conversation at family occasions, even if he wanted to talk about it. He also detested the jingoistic patriotism that came later. He never attended parades. He avoided marches, probably because the men would all reminisce and drink. It was all about getting drunk and two-up later, as far as he could see. Charlie was abstemious, but not a wowser. Self-indulgence was not an option for that generation. Charlie founded Blackburn Rover Scouts and laid wreathes at the Shrine of Remembrance on behalf of the Scout Movement. He would have done that out of honour and to demonstrate to the boys how to show true respect. For Charlie the whole experience of the War was about survival. Young men, thrown together, quickly came to depend on one another. Themselves a mixed-up lot, they worked together in the trenches simply in order to get through it. Sticking together made tolerable a situation that was hostile, vicious, and ludicrous. You could die at any moment. They would watch their brothers and friends being shot to pieces right before their eyes. It was in these baffling and desperate circumstances that the men worked together. Later the term ‘mateship’ was used of this behaviour, which is why the term today has changed. Mateship was about dealing every day with meaningless terror. Once arrived on the Front it quickly became obvious to these teenagers that the officers didn’t know what they were doing. An acre of mud could be won then lost again within days. Consequent disrespect for the officers informed Charlie’s disapproval too of making the chaplains officers, because they became distant from the soldiers. It tended to make it difficult for the chaplains to minister effectively to the men. Charlie married Evelyn McKeown in 1921. She never talked about the War either, but when I visited her at Cabrini Hospital in the 1980s she was on powerful painkillers and not her usual composed self. Staring out over the rooftops of Malvern her mind was fraught by the past. I might have said something about her youth because she suddenly burst into uncontrollable crying and yelled out, “Oh the waste! All those boys! The waste! The waste!” I was silenced by the sight of her distress. I still think about that visit when I hear our glib modern throwaways like “Haven’t you got over it yet?” I know that trauma can never go away, it stays inside and changes how people relate to the world, how they understand everything, sometimes. Sixty years later my grandmother still mourned the young men she had loved and lost to the War. The War affected everyone’s lives, got into every family. Armistice Day (now Remembrance Day) was more significant than Anzac Day for my grandparent’s generation, because it commemorated the end of a traumatic experience in their own lives. There was an ending. Those who came later ponder the distance between our way of remembering the War and theirs.