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live with his daughter (my mother). I was a dad by then, as was my half-brother and my sister and half-sister were married. He lived comfortably with my mother (she didn’t work due to illness) until time caught up with him and he was taken from us in 2003.<h1 id="cf9b">My Grandad And Me:</h1>I loved my Grandfather dearly and many of my favourite childhood memories revolve around our family trips, to Chesterfield, by train, from our home in Cleethorpes. He would take me and my sister swimming at a local lido. Leave us in the children’s room at the working men’s club with crisps, sausage rolls and a bottle of lemonade with a straw. We would hold our ears to the glass partition and giggle at the naughty jokes from the stand-up comedian’s set. The countryside around the edge of the estate was beautiful. I was always fascinated by the Belmont radio transmitter, towering over the distant South Pennines.When he visited us at Cleethorpes he would take us out to the beach, for ice cream and fish and chips. As I got older (15/16) we would go to our local pub (The Crow’s Nest), lie about my age, drink keg bitter (he would have mild) and talk about the fortunes of Chesterfield FC and Grimsby Town FC. This was the time when, because I didn’t have a dad (deceased 1965 while I was aged three), I feel it was he who taught me how to be a man, I would sit on the closed toilet seat, as a child, and watch, fascinated by the way he shaved, the old way with a soapy brush and a Gillette safety razor. Through his example, I became a bloke, a beer drinker, a football fan and, most importantly, a responsible adult and dad. I never attained his standard, but the best of me is down to him.He was the sweetest, calmest man I have ever known. He was always immaculately turned out (shirt and tie). He never swore. He used the word “Blessed” (as in two-syllable bless-ed, not like blest) when something annoyed him. “That blessed referee should have given a penalty”, that kind of thing. Imagine what I would say instead and you get the point. He never had a bad word for anyone, never gossiped, and always gave the benefit of the doubt. When I hear the word “gentleman” it is him I imagine.There was one occasion when he said a “fruity” word and I still use this phrase to this day. He caught me in the back garden, around 1978, crying because my girlfriend had packed me in. His words of comfort were; “You will never understand women as long as you have a hole in your arse.” There was no way I could cry after that. That single sentence, and its dead-pan delivery, became the foundation block of my personal sense of humour. It tricks you with its initial serious tone and delivers the unexpected, ridiculousness of your plight, right at the end. It washes all your self-importance away and, gently, with a smile on its face, reminds you of your limitations and to let go of the things you will never have power over.He never talked about the war and what happened to him. He never said anything bad about the Germans (most of them suffered as he did, was his explanation). He never talked of his injuries or the loss of his comrades. But my sister and I used to catch him when he thought we weren’t looking. His face would crease up now and then, his eyes tightly shut, teeth firmly gritted. He would try to massage the grimace out of his face, fingers rubbing his eyelids, kneading his forehead and the scars on his scalp, barely hidden by his thinning grey hair. Sometimes you would see him staring into space for long periods and you would have to say his name several times before he snapped out of his reverie. “Where did you go, Grandad?” “Oh, nowhere.” The welling in his eyes told us differently.It was too late to help him by the time I found out what PTSD was, but when I did, I knew he suffered from it, my sister also knew, it cursed him. What horror did he witness? What pain did he suffer? What was it like to walk, slow and plodding, because of injury, like an old man in yo

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ur thirties, forties or fifties? I’m sixty now and I can walk faster than I ever saw him walk. His one chance on Earth diminished, because of cruelty and the intransigence of a global elite, who wanted his protection but cared nothing for his welfare.I was in Grimsby’s Freshney Place shopping centre when I got the call on the new-fangled mobile phone thingy, I had bought from Argos only two weeks previously. My sister informed me that he was in the hospital and wasn’t going to make it to tea time “come quickly”. When I arrived he was Chayne-stoking, I kissed him on the forehead, whispered “I love you”, and, about forty-five minutes later, after three false alarms, his chest deflated and came to rest. I kissed him again and went around the room hugging each family member. Never had my family been so silent.<h1 id="156d">Lest We Remember:</h1>Shortly after Thatcher’s disgusting and evil early eighties attack, on the working class, took my grandad’s livelihood away, a young man (me), freshly politicised by late seventies, early eighties punk rock, and possessing an idealised image of the post-war, cradle-to-grave, contract with the people, turned on the TV. I watched the Remembrance ceremony, taking place at the Cenotaph, where Parliament Street and Whitehall melt into each other, I watched a solemn-looking Margaret Thatcher, the Queen and a parade of “dignitaries” laying wreaths and bowing to the tomb of the unknown soldier. I turned off the TV and I have never watched that ceremony since.I am sickened by an elite that could never understand what my grandad went through and how his whole life was shaped by it. Thatcher never remembered his sacrifice, when she ended his chance to live a reasonable dignified lifestyle, without handouts. She denied him that. The Queen remained motionless, emotionless, unmoved by what “her” majesty’s government did to him and many hundreds of thousands like him. The act of turning up in a gold-plated carriage while he took charity coal for winter warmth, was decreed acceptable by a God who blessed her righteousness. A God I don’t believe in.Remembrance Day has now been co-opted by boomer generation, exceptionalist, racist, poppy fascist thugs, who cannot even begin to understand what the returning, second world war combat soldiers experienced and what they embraced and deserved as they emerged from it. The Boomer generation swallowed the Thatcherite, Randian red pill. They bought their council houses, turning them into investment opportunities instead of homes, and believed that making a few people extremely wealthy will make their lives better. They will wear their grandfather’s medals to express their “Great British Pride” and then sell their grandchildren down the river for a tax cut.Remembrance Day is a way for the elite to remind you of who you are. Collateral damage. Casualties. Sufferers. Sacrificial lambs, eviscerated at the altar of their desire. Remembrance Day is designed to make you forget all that. I know that because my Grandad told me, and he would know.Not like you, yes you, the 60-year-old bloke in the pub, wearing your Grandad’s medals, bowing your head in synch with the King on a huge widescreen TV. Then, when it’s all over, go home and ring the single mother tenant to tell her that her rent will be going up in line with inflation, on the ex-council house you inherited, and “us small landlords are struggling too you know”. I’ll remember you.I will be publishing this article at 11:00 on Sunday morning 13/11/2022 because I live around the corner from our town’s war memorial and all the roads will be closed for the ceremony. I won’t be able to visit my grandad’s grave because, on Remembrance Day, they forgot about my grandad, as they did on all the other days.After publishing, I will not stand silent for two bless-ed minutes. I will tell my wife about everything I remember about my Grandad and the sacrifice he made for me.</article></body>

My Grandad Was The War Hero Remembrance Day Forgot.

The Years Condemned

My Grandfather died 19 years ago (2003). His whole adult life was defined by being a victim of war and a national elite that never cared about him.

His story is why I believe Remembrance Day is a sham, a throwback to a time of cap-doffing serfdom and the perpetuation of a divisive class system which keeps us at war with each other. The true war heroes and their memories are exploited by rabid media, which works only for the rich and powerful. Remembrance Day is for forgetting.

His Story:

My Grandad was born and lived his childhood on the outskirts of the North Derbyshire town of Chesterfield. His father was a lockkeeper on the Chesterfield Canal which ran parallel to the River Rother. His mother and father treated him as chattel, as many parents of that generation did. He was regularly beaten and put to work, in ways we would consider slavery today. His was not a happy childhood.

When the second world war broke out, the country’s young men were called upon to fight, and he saw it as an opportunity to escape. He lied about his age (15) and took the King’s shilling. He was sent to Grimsby for basic training with the Royal Lincolnshire Regiment. During his time in Grimsby, he met his future wife, my Grandmother on my Mother’s side.

In 1944 he, along with his regiment, was flown into Holland to take part in Operation Market Garden (A Bridge Too Far). Very early into the allied incursion, my Grandad’s squad encountered heavy shelling and most of them were killed. My Grandad took two large pieces of shrapnel, one to his head, the other to the back of his left thigh. After extensive field surgery, he made it back to England alive and had a metal plate inserted to stabilise his skull.

After the war, he returned to Grimsby, married his “sweetheart” and fathered my Mother and Uncle. Not long after he got news of the death of his Mother. Shortly after her funeral, he found out that his wife had been cheating on him with various other men. They divorced and he returned to Chesterfield. His father fell ill and became disabled. As there was no one else to help, it fell upon him to become the sole carer for the father who brutalised him.

The council helped them into a three-bedroomed, semi-detached house on one of the new post-war regeneration estates. Because of his injuries, he struggled to find work, but a friend from the working men’s club, across the road from his house, was a union official at a nearby colliery. He put a good word in for him and managed to get him a job driving tipper trucks. His earnings meant he was able to keep his father comfortable and pay the bills, but luxuries eluded him. His near-death experience in Holland was the first and last time he left England. He never owned a car. His only pleasure was a few pints in the club.

In the early eighties, his father died. Then the colliery he worked at was closed down and he never worked again. Although the welfare state stepped in he lived a meagre existence. His few pints in the club, three or four times a week, became one night. His next-door neighbour helped him out in the winter with coal to keep him warm. The neighbour was still a miner (at a different pit) and he got his coal for free. The council started to pressure him to leave his house and live in a tower block near the town centre. When a private company, that took over control of the council houses, failed to carry out essential maintenance, my grandad’s health deteriorated and he fell into depression.

It was then that we (my mother, sister, half-brother and sister and I) intervened. We managed to overcome his pride and brought him to Cleethorpes to live with his daughter (my mother). I was a dad by then, as was my half-brother and my sister and half-sister were married. He lived comfortably with my mother (she didn’t work due to illness) until time caught up with him and he was taken from us in 2003.

My Grandad And Me:

I loved my Grandfather dearly and many of my favourite childhood memories revolve around our family trips, to Chesterfield, by train, from our home in Cleethorpes. He would take me and my sister swimming at a local lido. Leave us in the children’s room at the working men’s club with crisps, sausage rolls and a bottle of lemonade with a straw. We would hold our ears to the glass partition and giggle at the naughty jokes from the stand-up comedian’s set. The countryside around the edge of the estate was beautiful. I was always fascinated by the Belmont radio transmitter, towering over the distant South Pennines.

When he visited us at Cleethorpes he would take us out to the beach, for ice cream and fish and chips. As I got older (15/16) we would go to our local pub (The Crow’s Nest), lie about my age, drink keg bitter (he would have mild) and talk about the fortunes of Chesterfield FC and Grimsby Town FC. This was the time when, because I didn’t have a dad (deceased 1965 while I was aged three), I feel it was he who taught me how to be a man, I would sit on the closed toilet seat, as a child, and watch, fascinated by the way he shaved, the old way with a soapy brush and a Gillette safety razor. Through his example, I became a bloke, a beer drinker, a football fan and, most importantly, a responsible adult and dad. I never attained his standard, but the best of me is down to him.

He was the sweetest, calmest man I have ever known. He was always immaculately turned out (shirt and tie). He never swore. He used the word “Blessed” (as in two-syllable bless-ed, not like blest) when something annoyed him. “That blessed referee should have given a penalty”, that kind of thing. Imagine what I would say instead and you get the point. He never had a bad word for anyone, never gossiped, and always gave the benefit of the doubt. When I hear the word “gentleman” it is him I imagine.

There was one occasion when he said a “fruity” word and I still use this phrase to this day. He caught me in the back garden, around 1978, crying because my girlfriend had packed me in. His words of comfort were; “You will never understand women as long as you have a hole in your arse.” There was no way I could cry after that. That single sentence, and its dead-pan delivery, became the foundation block of my personal sense of humour. It tricks you with its initial serious tone and delivers the unexpected, ridiculousness of your plight, right at the end. It washes all your self-importance away and, gently, with a smile on its face, reminds you of your limitations and to let go of the things you will never have power over.

He never talked about the war and what happened to him. He never said anything bad about the Germans (most of them suffered as he did, was his explanation). He never talked of his injuries or the loss of his comrades. But my sister and I used to catch him when he thought we weren’t looking. His face would crease up now and then, his eyes tightly shut, teeth firmly gritted. He would try to massage the grimace out of his face, fingers rubbing his eyelids, kneading his forehead and the scars on his scalp, barely hidden by his thinning grey hair. Sometimes you would see him staring into space for long periods and you would have to say his name several times before he snapped out of his reverie. “Where did you go, Grandad?” “Oh, nowhere.” The welling in his eyes told us differently.

It was too late to help him by the time I found out what PTSD was, but when I did, I knew he suffered from it, my sister also knew, it cursed him. What horror did he witness? What pain did he suffer? What was it like to walk, slow and plodding, because of injury, like an old man in your thirties, forties or fifties? I’m sixty now and I can walk faster than I ever saw him walk. His one chance on Earth diminished, because of cruelty and the intransigence of a global elite, who wanted his protection but cared nothing for his welfare.

I was in Grimsby’s Freshney Place shopping centre when I got the call on the new-fangled mobile phone thingy, I had bought from Argos only two weeks previously. My sister informed me that he was in the hospital and wasn’t going to make it to tea time “come quickly”. When I arrived he was Chayne-stoking, I kissed him on the forehead, whispered “I love you”, and, about forty-five minutes later, after three false alarms, his chest deflated and came to rest. I kissed him again and went around the room hugging each family member. Never had my family been so silent.

Lest We Remember:

Shortly after Thatcher’s disgusting and evil early eighties attack, on the working class, took my grandad’s livelihood away, a young man (me), freshly politicised by late seventies, early eighties punk rock, and possessing an idealised image of the post-war, cradle-to-grave, contract with the people, turned on the TV. I watched the Remembrance ceremony, taking place at the Cenotaph, where Parliament Street and Whitehall melt into each other, I watched a solemn-looking Margaret Thatcher, the Queen and a parade of “dignitaries” laying wreaths and bowing to the tomb of the unknown soldier. I turned off the TV and I have never watched that ceremony since.

I am sickened by an elite that could never understand what my grandad went through and how his whole life was shaped by it. Thatcher never remembered his sacrifice, when she ended his chance to live a reasonable dignified lifestyle, without handouts. She denied him that. The Queen remained motionless, emotionless, unmoved by what “her” majesty’s government did to him and many hundreds of thousands like him. The act of turning up in a gold-plated carriage while he took charity coal for winter warmth, was decreed acceptable by a God who blessed her righteousness. A God I don’t believe in.

Remembrance Day has now been co-opted by boomer generation, exceptionalist, racist, poppy fascist thugs, who cannot even begin to understand what the returning, second world war combat soldiers experienced and what they embraced and deserved as they emerged from it. The Boomer generation swallowed the Thatcherite, Randian red pill. They bought their council houses, turning them into investment opportunities instead of homes, and believed that making a few people extremely wealthy will make their lives better. They will wear their grandfather’s medals to express their “Great British Pride” and then sell their grandchildren down the river for a tax cut.

Remembrance Day is a way for the elite to remind you of who you are. Collateral damage. Casualties. Sufferers. Sacrificial lambs, eviscerated at the altar of their desire. Remembrance Day is designed to make you forget all that. I know that because my Grandad told me, and he would know.

Not like you, yes you, the 60-year-old bloke in the pub, wearing your Grandad’s medals, bowing your head in synch with the King on a huge widescreen TV. Then, when it’s all over, go home and ring the single mother tenant to tell her that her rent will be going up in line with inflation, on the ex-council house you inherited, and “us small landlords are struggling too you know”. I’ll remember you.

I will be publishing this article at 11:00 on Sunday morning 13/11/2022 because I live around the corner from our town’s war memorial and all the roads will be closed for the ceremony. I won’t be able to visit my grandad’s grave because, on Remembrance Day, they forgot about my grandad, as they did on all the other days.

After publishing, I will not stand silent for two bless-ed minutes. I will tell my wife about everything I remember about my Grandad and the sacrifice he made for me.