Snapshot: My great-grandfather, killed 100 years ago
This is a photograph of my great-grandparents, Ben and Rosina Lane, with their two children, Mary and Allen. I can’t say it’s my favourite picture because the story behind it is sad, but it is one with great resonance, especially at this time of year. It is the only picture of them as a family, taken before my great-grandfather left to fight in the first world war, never to return. He was killed on 14 February 1917.
The date meant that Valentine’s Day could never be just about cards and flowers in our family. To my grandmother, it was the day her beloved father died. To my great-grandmother, the day she was widowed.
When I grew up in the small town of Brecon, Powys, in the 1970s and 80s, the first world war was already “just history” for most people, with little, if any, relevance for my generation. But for me it was different as my great-grandmother was still living. Known as Nannie (an epithet recalling her occupation before marriage), she lived to 101 and the memory of the war lived on with her long after many of her contemporaries had died.
Our family grew up knowing how she had lost her husband in the Mesopotamia campaign; how it took her many months to find out what happened to him and how she was haunted by the fear he had gone to his grave without receiving her letters. We all learned how he was a kind and gentle father, a gardener who did not want to go to war; how he was killed by a Turkish sniper’s bullet.
Perhaps if he had died on any other date it might have been easier to forget. But on the day of the year when every advert and shop window induces us to remember our loves, Nannie remembered she had lost hers.
This photograph says so much. Nannie looks serious, holding her baby son. My grandmother is very much Daddy’s girl; she has not been made to sit down but permitted to stand on the bench leaning against her father’s shoulder. My great-grandfather stares out of the picture almost accusingly. This was a husband who had already bought his wife a sewing machine so she could support herself after he was gone; a man who knew he was not coming back.
This Valentine’s it will be 100 years since a single shot shattered their lives. This picture is a tribute to their memory. Angela G Owens
Playlist: A break with my dad’s music of the past
Love Missile F1-11 by Sigue Sigue Sputnik
“The US bombs cruising overhead / But there goes my love rocket red / Shoot it up / Oh, shoot it up”
In 1986, I was 14 and outgrowing Star Wars and in need of something new, then lo, the song and band to change me arrived. The future was about to unfurl, and Sputnik were my guides.
My dad’s tenure in the armed forces was ending and with that a collective step into a new life without order – moving every two years would be replaced with a state of permanence and suffocation, things would never be the same again. We had left the strictures of regimented life and Sigue Sigue Sputnik had created a (healthy) juncture in my relationship with my dad’s music of the past.
Proclaiming that they “invented the future”, they were the first group to completely distance me from my dad’s music, offering a deeper awareness of the past, the present and future.
First records are like first loves: the giddy rush of anticipation, the adrenaline fear-flood of mystery, to touch is too much, an event forever imbued with memories of place, space and time. This record transports me to a time of change, upheaval and new beginnings in the unknown. A realisation that being “of” a place and not “from” it would come to define me, as a feeling of rootlessness and no fixed abode (metaphysically) would pervade for 30 years.
Like true visionaries, Sputnik foretold the future by satirising the present, avatars sent to warn me about the narcotising effects of gadgetry, where plugging in means switching off, the narcissistic malfeasance of media and screens and omnipresent sexual imagery – all heady stuff for an adolescent.
By disassembling and reassembling numerous conventions and styles, this extravagantly attired group put the “art” into artifice and the “mode” into postmodern. Those who listened attentively have a grasp on today’s dystopia; those who didn’t, amble around like Matrix-addled zombies, craving their charge, pining for a poke or a like.
This song still signifies that last gasp of being a “scaley brat” and also the fact that my dad’s no longer here. He found SSS absurd, which suited me fine. Kevin Quinn
We love to eat: Currant leftovers/devil’s nose
Ingredients
Leftover uncooked pastry rolled out into a circle
Margarine
Sugar – white or brown
Dried fruit
Spread a thin layer of margarine over the centre of the circle of pastry, leaving about one inch without margarine around the edge. Sprinkle the sugar over the margarine. Sprinkle dried fruit of your choice over the sugar. Damp the ring of pastry that has not been covered and draw the edges over the circle to cover the fruit and seal. Flour a baking tin, turn the prepared pastry over and brush with milk and place in a baking tin. Bake at 180C until browned and cooked through. Turn out on to a wire rack and sprinkle with sugar.
As the eldest of four children, I regularly helped my mother with the baking. My parents had met and married during the war when they were interned by the Japanese in Hong Kong. As a consequence of their wartime experience, food was never wasted in our household. The last scraps of pastry were used to make what we in our family called currant leftovers.
Imagine my surprise when early in married life, I baked these same currant pastries and my husband, Adrian, remarked delightedly that it was a long time since he had eaten “devil’s nose”! It transpires that in his home town of Wigan these pastries have this name (a name which would not have been appreciated by Nonconformist parents!).
As children we weren’t allowed to say that we were starving, because our parents said we didn’t know what it was like to be starving – as they had experienced as prisoners of war. Christine Alker
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