What my taught me Grandfather’s tears about fake history
We all love to bask in the reflected glory of family tales. But leaving out the awkward bits can make a mockery of the past, writes the author of an important new book
FAMILIES are expert propagandists – weaving narratives and editing out the bits they don’t like – while seeking out ancestors that make us feel special and good about ourselves. In a celebrated 2016 episode of the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are, the actor Danny Dyer discovered – to his astonishment – that he was a descendant of King Edward III and has been dining out on it ever since.
But family trees are a complicated business. Not so much trees as balls of string. If you have a British ancestor, you are likely to be descended from Edward III, too. Does that make you royal? Well – arguably yes – but you are probably also descended from the person who cleaned out the royal pigsty.
As a child in the late 1970s I was obsessed with war.The shelves on my bedroom wall in our Essex home creaked under the weight of Commando comic books.
The cupboard bulged with an armoury of toy weapons. I devoured Saturday afternoon action films, and in the playground at school we’d reenact Where Eagles Dare – with the unpopular kids playing the Nazis.
I even had a record of war film themes I’d thump out on the family record player. I knew everything there was to know about tanks and guns and Operation Overlord, the battle to liberate Europe. Perhaps it was because both world wars felt personal to me. My father had fought in the second and my surviving grandfather in the first.
All attempts to get my father to talk about it ended – in my early life at least – in rambling stories about building bridges, he had been in the Royal Engineers. My grandad,
Martin Hulme, on the other hand had been in the trenches and was potentially a source of valuable first-hand information on the thrill of war. In my mother’s version of events, his experience sounded like a Hollywood film. The story went like this. In August 1914 with war declared and having fallen out with his parents, Grandad climbed down a drainpipe at the family home outside Stoke on Trent and ran off to war.
Through “family connections” he joined the ranks of the glamorous Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and served out the next four years in kilt and beret.
He’d dodged bullets, survived gas attacks and battled in the rat-infested trenches before getting back home on “the last boat”. It seemed incongruous that the little old man I knew had once had such thrilling experiences but on our twice-yearly visits to Staffordshire, I would attempt to get him to tell me about them and sometimes he would try to oblige.
Things usually started well. He’d talk about joining up and being waved off to war. He’d go on at some length about the mud and the names of his pals. At some point, he’d fetch down a photo or take out a Bible in which he’d written down all the places where he’d fought: Ypres, the Somme and Vimy Ridge. Then he’d start talking about the friends again and more specifically those he’d lost. And as he did, his voice would falter and his eyes brim before – to my horror – he’d start to cry, at which point my grandmother, observing things from the other side of the room, would boom: “Is he talking about the war again? Shut up about the war, Martin, he doesn’t want to hear that.” Or words to that effect. None of it made sense to the 10-year-old me. The war had been exciting – everyone knew that – but the way Grandad told it sounded nothing like the comics and the films.
Both of my grandparents died within quite a short space of each other in 1985 and after that my mother would tell different stories about my grandfather – the time he’d tied a local man to a tree after an argument about money. The rages he flew into.The food he stockpiled.The gun he kept hidden behind his desk.
Years later, as I began to do the background research for my new book Fake History, the last vestiges of the glamorous
tale of the young man who ran away to war were stripped away.
The truth of Grandad’s war was quite different to the family saga I had been brought up on. He hadn’t joined up in 1914, but a year later and he had not got into the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders through “family connections” but been seconded to it.
In fact, he had been in the Machine Gun Regiment – the butchers of theWestern Front whose Vickers machine guns cut the young men who stepped out in front of them into ribbons of flesh.
HE WOULD have seen things that defy the very darkest recesses of our imagination. In time, the tins of stockpiled food in his cellar, the pent-up rage of his middle age, that gun and those tears – began to make sense.
Like millions of other young men of the time, he had been caught up in events that were beyond his control. And subsequently they had coloured his life. There was little romance in it. Quite obviously he had been suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress.
We all like good stories, particularly ones that can give us a bit of reflected glory. In the UK the two world wars have become a sort of secular religion and to have had a relative who was in either conflict makes many of us feel good about ourselves. Even as we remember those lost and faded generations it is important that we remember why our relatives were there, what caused it and what it really meant. We must remember too that not everyone who fought in the two horrendous conflicts was a hero or a victim. They were ordinary people – like my grandad.
The family sagas we all tell would often have it otherwise. Just as families edit their past and latch onto the bits that serve their narratives in the present, so countries do the same.
Many Britons like to think of themselves and their fellow 66 million citizens as having a sort of common identity. Politicians like to talk about our “Blitz” or our “Dunkirk Spirit” as if it was some magical quality etched into our DNA.
We like to talk about our “British sense of humour” as if we are the only people on Earth to laugh at silly things and “British values”, as if decency and tolerance and stiffupper-lippery were unique to these islands.
The danger comes when we start believing that we are exceptional and, for example, that our history is more interesting and fascinating than everyone else’s.
That our island story is the only one that matters and that our national heroes are somehow infallible.
In modern debates about statues or the legacy of people like Cecil Rhodes and Winston Churchill there’s a risk that amidst all the emotion and shouting on both sides we risk reducing the actual truth of events – just as my family did with Grandad. That in leaving out the awkward bits that don’t fit either side’s agenda, we end up faking history. Frequently the truth is far more interesting and entertaining.
Winston Churchill, for example, was a brilliant leader in those desperate wartime years. He made a difference and, yes, Britain was lucky to have him at the helm.
But he was also a human being and a politician with all that entailed. He was not just some cigar wielding superhero firing off wise-cracks. He was not universally popular. In his long parliamentary career, he made mistakes and was frequently booed in public.
As I argue in Fake History, I think that makes him far more interesting – and in many ways, more likable, than the caricature that we have all grown up with. It’s not just Winston, either. Ever more the events of our past are simplified and appropriated by politicians seeking to make points and grab hold of the agenda. We owe it to the people who were there to understand the truth.
But more than that – we owe it to ourselves to tackle the menace of fake history.