Harry: final part
Last part after cut.
As well as gardening my grandfather, in the way that secretly nosy old men do, got very involved with neighbourhood watch. He was unbelievably fond of postcode labelling stuff, if it stayed still for more than 30 seconds it got labelled. At one point my grandmother, his ex-wife, threw him out of her house after becoming fed up with his casual visit turning into a postcoding fest.
As part of his retirement he and Cate took up doing lots of travelling, seeing the world had always been his first love.
Whilst he was on one of a number of visits to Russia he had a couple of heart attacks. However, the doctor treating him discovered that he had served aboard one of the ships that protected Russia’s supply line during the war. So not only did he manage to get a remarkably attentive doctor, but he’s possibly one of the few people to go on holiday, have a heart attack and come home with a medal.
During the last years of his life he became involved in a society set up to memorialise the ship he was on that sank. As one of the very few living survivors at that time he was interviewed for a book, and went to the ceremony installing the memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum.
He and I had not spoken for about three years before he died, stubbornness is genetic too it seems.
References:
Apart obviously from my grandfather’s photographs and the history of his life which he wrote down I used some internet resources for a bit of help in drawing my pictures. Largely given that I hadn’t the foggiest what a U-boot looked like!
Royal Navy for erm, naval stuff. It isn’t tremendously helpful for actual information, they seem to have foregone good resources in favour of all out desperate recruitment. However, the pictures are good for uniforms, and there’s the odd ship on there.
U-Boat.Net is a great resource for pretty much all you could possibly want to know about U-boats/U-boots. As well as the boats it also has information about the people commanding them, who all to often have been characterised a rent-a-Nazi; middle aged men in dodgy roll neck sweaters and arched eyebrows.
Also the box of a Revell model of a U-boat, with picture on it. Hence why for purists the boat I’ve drawn is wrong.
If you are remotely interested in such things, the book about Dunedin’s sinking is called ‘Blood in the Sea’ and is by Stuart Gill.
Tags: drawings, history, story
