In retrospect, time often seems to go so slowly and those apocryphal youthful summers that seemed to last forever and were always sunny, were actually the same length as they are now and just as tedious.
I used to live in Denmark and still have a number of very good friends over there. One of them is an English chap, whom I shall name Jeremy - not his real name, as they say in the press. Our friendship has always been very literary, as we both love books and we were aways swapping them and discussing our favourite writers on nights out in town before marriage, divorce and children caught up with us. Our reading habits were encouraged and fostered by the lovely manager of an international bookshop in Copenhagen. When you went in to browse, she would say in her perfect but slightly Norwegian accented English, "Ah Phil, good to see you. I have some books you should read..." and sure enough she would have found five or six titles she knew I would like and I would always leave the bookshop having spent much more than I intended. The same would happen with Jeremy.
We were never part of the ex-pat community, having both decided early on to go as native as possible. We both spoke fluent Danish and if anyone asked - which they did - whether we considered ourselves English or British, we'd reply 'European' just to muddy the water. Nevertheless, when we spoke about missing 'home' we discovered that we both haboured a kind of nostalgia for an England that neither of us had experienced.
We were both born in the '50s, he of definite working class Midlands stock and the first in his family to go to university in Swansea, while I came from a relatively middle class background, with an uncle who was a vicar, which brought with i certain familial expectations. Not that I was destined for the church, but there was a sense, largely inculcated by my domineering grandmother, that we were a bit better than others.
Jeremy was always good at school while I, though appearing clever enough in class, always suffered when tests or exams came around. Prior to just scraping through my 11 plus, the headmaster told my parents that I was intellectual rather ran academic. That pleased my mother no end, as being an intellectual was to her far more romantic than being a dusty academic. Scraping through yet again, I managed to get into what is now known as Manchester Metropolitan University but was then a Teacher's Training College.
But back to Jeremy and I as Englishmen abroad. At some point, we realised that the England we felt nostalgic about could never have existed for us, being largely influenced by the books we had read. It would probably have been a story set in the 1930s inhabited by posh girls in flowered dresses and dashing chaps with sports cars who had just come down from Oxford, who drank warm beer and played cricket on the green. In five years time they would be in the RAF or a good regiment and would be off to give Hitler a bloody nose.
That makes it all sound a bit Mills and Boon, although it was probably Evelyn Waugh, but perhaps, in addition to the books we read, it may have been the very fact that we were in a different country that caused all the literary cliches associated with 'home' to come alive for us.
I'm also a bit obsessed by the First World War. All the males of my grandparents family fought in it and two of my great-uncles lost their lives; one at one of the battles around Ypres and one on The Somme. One is commemorated on The Menin Gate in Ypres and the other on the massive red brick memorial at Thiepval designed by Edwin Lutyens. The immensely sad thing about this is that these are memorials to the missing, who could not be buried, meaning that their lives were probably snuffed out by high explosives, leaving only a name in an Army record book to be inscribed on a monument.
So, one February some years ago to coincide with a significant birthday, I decided to go and find Uncle Albert in Ypres. "What, on your own?" You might ask, ".... on this significant milestone in your life?" Well, yes. I had decided that I wasn't going to make any big deal of it, so I didn't actually tell anybody. My family knew of course, but they weren't going to blab, so I reasoned that as far as the rest of the world was concerned, I would just mysteriously disappear for a few days.
My journey began at Sandwich Station, which I reckoned hadn't changed much since 1916, when the platforms would have been crowded with troops bound for the front. Many of them would be ferried to France on the barges that were constructed at Port Richborough, just a short march down the road. I pictured the scene and wrote some notes, imagining myself as an officer (of course!) bound for France, although in my 21st century case, on the way to the Eurostar at St Pancras.
I rented a small car from Lille station and found my billet for the next few days, which was a cheapish but surprisingly pleasant art deco-inspired hotel on one of the roads out of the city towards Ypres. The next day after breakfast, I ventured out towards the 'front', as I referred to it in my notes. Ypres turned out to only be half an hours drive from Lille and I was surprised how many signs led to places I'd read about, Ploegsteert, Tournai (Tourcoing), Courtrai (Kortrijk), Zonnebeke Poelcapelle and Passendale - the infamous Passchendaele, where the front line trenches were completely obliterated by shell fire, leaving soldiers on both sides to fight and drown in the huge mud-filled shell holes that scattered the flat waterlogged plain.
I got out of the car on Passchendaele ridge, just past the crossroads memorialised in WW1 literature as Hellfire Corner. The road is slightly elevated, so you can see the landscape on both sides. On one side, the land is much lower and the water table considerably higher, so one could imagine how susceptible it would be to flooding. On the other, it sloped slightly upwards to the Tyne Cot memorial cemetery on the ridge that in 1917 formed part of the German lines, meaning that the British, Australian and Canadian troops fighting here would have been attacking uphill. As I stood on the ridge surveying the landscape, it began to snow - hard icy flakes whipping my face in the freezing wind as I tried to imagine not only surviving in the open in that kind of weather but having to fight in it. It's all different now and had the weather been more clement, the scene would have been quite bucolic, with dykes and small dairy farms scattered about the plain. A striking difference to what was happening in my head.
I returned to Ypres and after a beer in a small cafe just inside the walls of the town, I found Uncle Albert on the Menin Gate and bought a couple of books from Steve, a Canadian who owned an English language bookshop dedicated to World War One. Steve told me he was a photographer who had been commissioned by the Canadian government to take photographs of all the Canadian war graves. While he was working, he met a Belgian woman, fell in love and never went back.
Ypres is now quite a charming walled town that was completely destroyed during the war and was reconstructed as closely as possible to the original plans during the 1920s. And as far as I know, Steve is still there. Maybe one day I'll go back and visit him and say hello to Uncle Albert while I'm there.
One day I will write more about this visit, as it profoundly affected me and got me wondering why it is that my generation born in the 1950s still feel more of a pull from the cataclysmic conflict our grandfathers fought in rather than the one our fathers did. Is it because we're the last generation that had a direct contact with people who fought in it? Is it because it was the first proper technological war that brought advances not only in new ways of killing people but paradoxically, also in medicine, psychology and the role of women in society.
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