War had made her take cover and flee from education and progress

On my father’s side of the family, Cousin Dossie, (Dorothy Parrish, nee Drew) reputedly the Victorian Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone’s favourite granddaughter, lost two sons during the war. Sir William Gladstone of Hawarden informed me of this fact as late as 2015 and although I knew Dossie when I was a child, nobody had mentioned it. They all wanted to forget.

In their attempt to put the war behind them, my parents buried so much that we, the following generation, should have learned about. My family wasn’t unusual in this respect. Throughout the country there was a reluctance to remember these men and women. Of the institutions that memorialised them, schools were the first.

In 1948, Winchester College added the names of the fallen to War Cloister. In Singapore, disagreement as to the “rightness” of the British Imperial forces’ cause slowed down the procedure; even in Kintyre it wasn’t until 1954, 12 years after Angus was lost at sea, that his name and those of seven others were inscribed on the existing monument that stood opposite Cara.

When John, my grandfather, arranged the construction of the memorial after the Great War, the list of dead men was very long. The new one revealed that these young men were brought up near Largie. One was the ploughman’s son from the Ferry farm, another was brought up at the forge, his father the local blacksmith.

It was postulated that nobody could come to terms with the reality of having to go through it all again after the 1914-18 conflict, the war to end all wars.

When my generation came of age at the end of the 1960s, it reacted strongly against militarism. At that time, I had little interest in Angus, why he joined the army and how he died.

I was too much caught up with my own life, loves and aims. But, like Margaret Gibb with her uncle, there came a time when I wanted to find out about my lost relative. I no longer dismissed out of hand his apparently conventional attitudes nor his conformism to army discipline.

From having debunked for so long my family’s conservatism, approach towards religion and its adherence to traditional values, I realised that these objections failed to detract entirely from my uncle’s talent, dedication and strength. In 2010 a Scottish journalist wrote an appreciation of an elderly lady who had lived for many years without disclosing that she worked for the Special Operations Executive and had parachuted into occupied France during the war.

In praising the lady’s modesty, her reluctance to publicise her achievements, and self-sacrifice, the journalist made a plea for forgotten values, attitudes of my parents’ generation that were now regarded by many as old-fashioned and redundant.

I saw how my parents and their contemporaries had forfeited their youth to fight for freedom from tyranny and had been willing to give their lives for a just cause. Perhaps the triptych of Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, presented to Winchester College the year Angus entered the school, had influenced him, in spite of its patrician, elitest message.

Gallantry

These ideals of gallantry and dedication to serve others were enacted by men and women, their accomplishments becoming engraved in the minds of many. Captain Oates was one who, during Captain Robert Scott’s doomed 1912 Antarctic expedition to reach the South Pole, walked willingly from his tent into a blizzard in order to help his comrades survive.

His famous words “I am just going outside and I may be some time” belie his less-than-gallant behaviour towards young women, especially those from the “lower orders”.

In 2002, Michael Smith published a biography of the captain claiming that, before he set off on his polar escapade, Oates fathered a daughter with a 12-year-old girl. Notwithstanding the officer’s act, which today would be termed rape, honour of a sort was an accepted aspiration for most young men of the empire and Rudyard Kipling’s legendary poem, If, embodies these impossibly altruistic ideals.

Significantly, he ends with the requirement that men demonstrate empire’s primary demand: manliness, nobility, self-sacrifice and endurance without complaint. This was Angus’s code.

In addition, under dire conditions, he displayed humour, a sardonic wit, understatement, dignity. Jock dealt with life’s blows in a similar fashion: with an extraordinary insouciance towards the amputation of his leg by using his artificial limb to hammer nails into a gate-post. His courage, absence of self-pity, repression of emotion and disregard of pain should be remembered too.

Those who dishonoured this code, men who dressed as women to gain a place in a lifeboat as some did before the Titanic sank, and air crews who, during a tour of operations, avoided the target, dropping their bombs in a safe place instead, weren’t “playing up and playing the game”.

These were the men and women who profiteered from others’ privations. I remember a tale told by mum that illustrated her feelings towards such an individual. During the war, at Oban livestock market in Argyll, a farmer sold his cattle for a phenomenal price. On receiving his cheque the farmer was so delighted that he shouted at the top of his voice “Long Live the War!” His jubilation was short-lived; the auctioneer, whose son had been recently killed in action, sent him from the ring and banned him from ever coming back.

The memory, however, of Angus and my entitlement to appreciate his courage and selfsacrifice, in what was an arduous campaign, were obliterated. For six decades I was denied knowledge of his accomplishments. If Walter Gibson destroyed Angus’s reputation he helped to stunt my mother’s development. She was 19 when Jock lost his leg and 21 when Angus was reported missing.

After her efforts during the war to console Daisy, Gibson’s articles and book had the effect of corralling mum into timidity and fear. She could have achieved much and her failure to realise her potential amounted to another death, a death of the spirit.

At the outbreak of war, mum was about to enter Somerville College, Oxford, to read English literature but she postponed entry. Although she could have studied there after hostilities ceased, she was unwilling to grab the opportunity.

War had made her take cover and flee from education and progress. So, she married and gave birth to four children in the space of six years.

But mum kept her entrance exam papers for Somerville, a letter from the principal congratulating and offering her a place at the college, references from her army days, and her books: leather-bound volumes with gold hand-tooled lettering on the covers and marbled inside end pages of Shelley, Keats, Swinburne, Wordsworth, and Coleridge.

From one decade to another, they remained on a shelf unread. After the loss of her brother mum abandoned her dreams, and I hold the war and Gibson as culpable. Considering the importance of the mother/daughter relationship, we three sisters learned from her example; we hesitated to go out into the world and make something of our lives.

More tomorrow