By some random coincidence there are at least seven RAF guys on the tour. Obviously not Spitfire flying aces of old, but in fact all guys who crewed and maintained jets in the Cold War era. Now I love all things with an engine attached, it's no secret, and I have full respect for the pilots who take the reigns and ride these beasts of machines. But as any good pilot will admit, they only really borrow their planes from the men who build and rebuild and service and maintain them. And those boys get none of the glory. There is no movie made about the man who spends his career repairing the bits that go on the plane that the pilot relies on to both get the job done and keep him alive.
We are all here because we are honouring the men who came to this place to do what they did and all the things that happened. But several of the guys I have been drinking with in the bar have their own phenomenal stories which probably nobody will ever travel a mile to pay their respects for. We were talking about officers, both the good and the bad ones, and one of the RAF boys, now in his sixties, told a story about an exercise he did back in the Cold War era when he had to down tools and go get a rifle and prepare to defend their base. Afterwards a Squadron Leader happened to talk to him and asked how he thought the tactical exercise went. He told him "Well, honestly sir, I don't give a sh!t". The officer was taken aback, and said "Well how can you say that, you must care how the unit does, and how we are graded?"... He said "Sir, holding a rifle and guarding the base is not my job, and nobody cares how good I am at it"... The officer kept on - "But you must understand the bigger picture, obviously if you are called on to do something like that it is for good reason..."... And this chap turned to him and said "Sir, I am not good with a rifle. I service and load nuclear ordnance on to long range bombers. If I find myself standing at the gates with a gun, that means we have loaded our gear onto the planes, and they have departed. If the bombers have departed in anger, the pilots of those bombers know that after they have completed their mission, they will not have a base to return to. I know that once our bombers leave they will not come back, and if I am sent outside with a rifle to stand at the gate, my only job is to wait for a bright white flash, and then I don't have to worry about guarding the base, or anything else, ever again."
Funny how some people have a way of putting things in perspective.
The old lady who sits next to me on the coach is called Winifred. When we talked about why we were on the trip she said to retrace the journey of her father. Bear in mind this is WW1... I am here
for my great grandfather, Winifred was a late baby. She is everyone's picture of a lovely old lady. She is a bit dottery, a bit slow, she is quiet. I help her up and down the stairs. She lags behind, she makes her own way, but she doesn't complain. She didn't want to remind the guide about going to where her fathers unit fought because she didn't what to be a bother. Even though that's the entire reason she came one the trip. She showed me photos and cuttings of her father and told me what he had told her.
Today we went to where Winifred's dad and his chums were on Somme. Gary, the guide, bless him, told the story of the spot and then came and took her aside, and led her out into the field away from the group, and told her all about what had happened. Her brought her back and asked if she wanted to tell everyone, and she told us of how her father, at eighteen years of age, had stood some where near there and prepared to go into the war. From where they were, a massive tunnelled explosive charge went off adjacent, and her father was partially blinded. When they prepared to advance, to go as they famously say "over the top", her father's commander came down and told him he was obviously excused from the charge, but still half blind he took his rifle and said he had to go with his friends, and together over they went. Today we also saw the graves of the boys he went over with. We got back on the bus and sat down, and as we drove away Winifred quietly looked out the window, as she tends to do. After about ten minutes she turned and said "I'm sorry, I will pull myself together in a minute.." And I realised she had been quietly sat beside me weeping.
There is a Welsh couple on the trip, Taff and Mrs Taff (obviously), he ex RAF like, apparently, most people... The kind of couple you would love to be in your 60's, always laughing, mostly at each other, always making the rest of us laugh, never a bad word about anything, but Taff the kind of grizzled career Senior NCO you know would not take any stick from any man. We visited a cemetery today (there are literally cemeteries everywhere here, on every road there is another battle site and another cemetery for another unit)... We were hearing the story of an English unit, the Devons, as we stood amongst their headstones and Taff turned to me aside and said "Ey this boy is Welsh, there's an inscription on 'is 'edstone .." I said "What does that say then?".. He said "Well let's look.. It says 'Daniel my...' " and his voice just suddenly cracked and he turned away and looked at the ground and took a sharp breath.. And he apologised and took a moment, and turned back, and read "Daniel... my precious boy... sleep now in peace, for you will rise again"
That is the kind of place it is though. There can not be anywhere else in the world where the very air seems to hang so heavy around you with a sense of what has gone on here before.
Anyway, enough of this for now. I promise soon there will be more photos for those who struggle with long sequences of words, and I will obviously in due course regale you with stories of the French and all the ways they are stupid, apart from obviously just losing wars.
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