Week 41.08

                          Tendring Topics …..on Line

 

Meeting the Mighty

 

            Introduced to the Oberbürgermeister of Zittau one week and to the Lord-Lieutenant of the county of Suffolk the next.  I shall definitely be getting ideas above my station in life!  Whatever next?  At my age quite possibly St. Peter at the Pearly Gates.  That, I'm afraid, is not an event that will be recorded in Tendring Topics…on Line!

 

            I have explained at some length how I came to be involved with Zittau's Mayor.  The very brief encounter with the Lord-Lieutenant was the result of an invitation to an open-air Civic Service to be held in Ipswich in celebration of the centenary of the Territorial Army. This was to be followed by a Reception in the old Corn Exchange.

 

            It was not really my cup of tea.  I had finished with all things military many years ago and am happy to be described as a peacenik.  However, I have had strong links with the Territorial Army. I had volunteered for a Suffolk TA Regiment at the age of 17 and had subsequently served in it until it was destroyed and I was made a POW at the debacle of Tobruk in June 1942.  I had had good friends in the regiment who were never to see Ipswich or Suffolk again.  Moreover the Territoral Army had been the reason that my parents had brought me to Ipswich at the age of five. I still thought of it being my 'home town'.  My father, a former Regimental Sergeant Major in 'the regulars', had secured an appointment as Permanent Staff Instructor, including riding instructor, to a local Territorial Unit.  It was a job from which, as a result of the mechanisation of the army, he was made redundant five years later.  While it had lasted though, it was a job in which he had been completely happy and fulfilled.

 

            Two Ipswich ladies Diana and Jane, to whom I had been able to offer a little help in researching the brief history of my old regiment (in which both their fathers had served), urged me to go along, and offered to transport me there and back again.  There would be, they said, only a handful of 67^th Medium Regiment RA veterans still alive and capable of attending.

 

            So, I gratefully accepted the offer of a lift, brushed down my best suit (usually reserved for weddings and, more frequently these days, funerals) and went along.  Sunday 5^th October, as you may recall, made a bid to be reckoned the wettest day of a very wet year, so the 'open air service' took place in the Corn Exchange behind Ipswich's old Town Hall instead of on Corn Hill as had been planned.

 

            There was, of course, a local Territorial Unit, that unlike ours had both male and female members, on parade there.  I found that I disliked the foot stamping and the shouted orders, accentuated by the board floor and the enclosed surroundings, as much as ever I had.  However, I did warm to the commanding officer when, before the parade actually began, he gathered his troops around him informally to explain  what was expected of them, and addressed them as 'Ladies and Gentlemen'.

 

            That simply couldn't have happened in my day.  'Gentlemen' was a title reserved strictly for commissioned officers.  'Ladies' were their wives, female relatives and friends.  It was in the army that I learned to be class-conscious!

 

            The service, I have to say, was very good.  Two bible readings from a modern but not too banal translation, a rousing hymn 'Guide me O thou great Jehovah', some prayers and a mercifully short sermon.  I am something of a connoisseur of Christian religious services and I enjoyed it.

 

            I enjoyed the music of the military band and the get-together afterwards too.  There were, as I had been told, just a handful of 67^th Medium Regiment RA veterans.  Goodness, I knew that I had become old and decrepit but somehow it hadn't really occurred to me that all my former comrades would be old and decrepit too.  There were only two that I could positively remember from the past.  With one of them I had really been very friendly at one time, but he didn't remember me at all!  His wife, a charming lady, assured me that, sadly, he was like that with everybody.  With the other, who did remember me and I him, I had never been particularly friendly though, on this occasion, we had enough in common to manage to chat without falling out!

 

            He had lost his wife, as I had mine, just two years ago after a long period of illness.  He too was finding it difficult to cope with the loss.  His experience as a POW in Germany had been very different from mine.  He had worked all the time in a stone quarry and, as a result of an accident there, had broken a leg and was still partially disabled.  What's more, he told me that he had never received any of the Red Cross Parcels that certainly had kept us fit and well.  I have never encountered another POW whose experiences in Germany were as positive as mine but, on the other hand, I had never met another POW in Europe whose experience had been quite so awful as his.

 

            The Lord-Lieutenant looked in on us veterans, and was introduced to, and spoke briefly to me.  He seemed a little startled when I told him that only the previous week I had been back to Germany and now had good friends there. 'Good show!' he said, and then, 'I expect you were jolly pleased when our chaps turned up to liberate you'.

 

.  Once again he seemed somewhat taken aback when I told him that in fact I had liberated myself with a great deal of help from the Soviet Army.  He passed quickly onto someone else who no doubt had a more predictable story to tell him.

 

Diana and Jane, my friends, and the friends of all we 67^th veterans, had mounted a photographic exhibition graphically showing the history and travels of the 67^th Medium Regiment from 1939 until Nemesis caught up with us at Tobruk on 21^st June 1942.  It was a labour of love that attracted much well deserved interest.

 

Diana's husband Ray had driven me from Clacton to Ipswich and he and Diana kindly drove me home again at the end. 

 

I was grateful to them and had thoroughly enjoyed the experience.  However  the knowledge, unearthed by Jane and Diana in the course of their researches, that many more of my former comrades in the 67^th had died from 'friendly fire' than had ever been killed by the Germans and Italians, had cast a shadow over the occasion for me.  Fifty had drowned when, in November 1942, an Italian steamer SS Scillin, transporting them from a POW camp in Tripoli to one in Italy, had been sunk by a British submarine.  A mental image of those young Suffolk men in their early twenties, many of whom I had known, helplessly trapped in the hold of that sinking vessel, has haunted me ever since I learned of the disaster, just a few years ago.

 

'They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old………'  but they would have loved to have had the opportunity to!

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Is it Art?

 

            I didn't exactly leap in eager anticipation when, a few weeks ago, a headlined story on the front page of the Clacton Gazette announced that a 'World famous artist' was on his way to Jaywick where he would in November build 'a structure' on a vacant plot in Brooklands Gardens that would stay there for three months.

 

            The artist is Nathan Coley, of whom I confess I had never previously heard but who is, we were told, 'A Turner-Prize nominated artist'.  The Turner prize?  Isn't that the one that in recent years has been awarded to an unmade bed, a light being switched on and off, a pile of bricks and an animal carcase preserved in formalin?

 

            An example of Mr Nathan's work was helpfully shown on the Gazette's front page.  It consisted of scaffolding on which, in capital letters the following words were displayed: HEAVEN IS A PLACE WHERE NOTHING EVER HAPPENS.  That is, no doubt, a very deep thought that has probably challenged thousands of 'seekers after Truth' who may have happened to see it.  Perhaps it is either because I am a hopeless philistine, or because words mean more to me than images, that I much prefer Omar Khayyam's vision of an earthly paradise

 

Here, with a book of verse beneath a bough,

A jug of wine, a book of verse, and thou

Beside me, singing in the wilderness;

The wilderness were paradise enow.

 

            Who can say though?  Perhaps the piece of art to be unveiled in November will bring the crowds flocking to 'deprived area' Jaywick.

 

            An indication of the public taste in art was suggested by a recent poll published in a national newspaper which found that over 60 percent of people questioned recognised a picture of Kate Moss by 'Banksie', the graffiti artist.  Less than 6 percent recognised Leonardo da Vinci's 'Mona Lisa'!

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Local Issues

 

            Obviously the views of local people should be considered when building or similar developments are taking place in their immediate vicinity.  I fear though, that if local people were to have an over-riding veto, no new development would ever take place.  The needs and the interests of the wider community must take precedence.

 

            I am sure for instance that Tendring Councillors were wrong to yield to strident local protests and to refuse permission for a small wind farm to be established between St Osyth and Clacton.  I don't believe that it would have been a visual or aural nuisance to anybody – and we do need renewable sources of energy.

 

            Then there's the rejection of the proposed small travellers' site in Weeley.  I'm sure that everyone would say, 'Of course travellers have to have somewhere to stay – but that's just the wrong place'.  I wonder where 'the right place' could possibly be?  Anywhere near any existing residence produces instant protest and so does 'in the midst of hitherto unspoilt countryside'.   Perhaps the middle of an existing refuse dump would be acceptable!

 

            It would, I think, be more honest, and possibly kinder in the long run, to announce that there simply isn't a place for nomadic or semi-nomadic people in this over-populated island and make no provision for them whatsoever except in permanent conventional homes.  But I suppose that we wouldn't want to make that provision either.

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My Ear!

 

            I had another chunk cut out of my left ear yesterday.  All went according to plan.  This time I had accepted the offer of a good friend (I am indeed fortunate in my friends and relatives!) to drive me to and from Colchester, to wait with me for the op. and be there to welcome me when I came out of the theatre.  It was indeed wonderful to see a friendly face when I returned to the ward.

 

            I didn't have too long to wait when we got to the hospital.  The operation, again by a friendly woman surgeon, was even more painless than the earlier one, and  I am able have the stitches out locally in about a fortnight's time.

 

            I have to say that this time I did experience more pain as the anaesthetic wore off (it had been a bigger operation) and I didn't get much sleep last night.   However it seems much better this morning though it has left me feeling very tired.  I must try to remember that I'm much nearer ninety than eighty!

 

            Oh yes, enough of my ear is left to support my glasses but I do now look distinctly lop-eared!

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