Snapshot: The too-short lives of the Semple boys
“The first people I think of on Remembrance Sunday are my uncles.” My uncle Bill, by marriage, said these words to me a few years ago. We’d been seeing each other as I worked on a children’s book, Dear Jelly … Family Letters from the First World War, that reproduces the letters written by his uncles to their sisters, Mabel and Eileen, Mabel being his mother. Her brothers, William and Robert Semple, had enlisted soon after the first world war began and kept in touch with the family by letter.
Sadly, a different sort of letter arrived at the family home in early July 1916. The War Office informed the family that 2Lt William Semple of the King’s Royal Rifles Corps was missing in action, after an ill-fated trench raid on the eve of the Battle of the Somme. Perhaps there was reason for hope – he might be lying injured in a field hospital in France, or have been taken prisoner by the Germans.
Weeks passed with no further information. Distraught, William’s mother, Lady Ethel Semple, tried to find out more. Later that summer, her connections led to a strange interview. She was given permission to talk to a German officer, now a prisoner of war in England. He had been defending the trench that was raided by members of William’s battalion and he was able to confirm that there was no reason for hope. William had died during the raid and the German officer had identified him by the tailor’s bill in his tunic pocket. One small consolation he could offer the family was that William had been buried and his grave marked. William was 21.
William’s brother Robert survived the Somme and continued to fight in the war, playing his part in the Royal Field Artillery and rising to the rank of captain. He wrote many amusing letters, often illustrated with drawings to make his sisters laugh. Then tragedy struck again when he caught Spanish flu in a French hospital while recovering from a gunshot wound. He died, aged 22, just days short of the Armistice in November 1918.
More than a million servicemen – fighting with the British, French or German forces – were injured or died during the Battle of the Somme, which ground to a halt in mid-November 1916. Like so many families across Europe, the Semples had to learn to live with their loss. In the early 1920s, they claimed the brothers’ posthumous medals and they kept many of their letters. Just after Mabel was married in 1928, she ran across from the bridal party, gathered outside the church, to lay her wedding bouquet on the war memorial inscribed with her brothers’ names. Mabel, who changed her name to Katherine, named her youngest son (my uncle Bill) William Robert Brian Wigglesworth after her brothers and her husband. The Semple brothers may not have lived long lives, but they are still remembered.
Sarah Ridley
Playlist: Satire eluded us but it helped do the dishes
Political Science by Randy Newman
“No one likes us – I don’t know why / We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try / But all around, even our old friends put us down / Let’s drop the big one and see what happens”
When I was growing up, for reasons that remain unclear, the family sound system was a 10-CD car changer instead of a standard CD player. The decision about which 10 albums made the cut each fortnight or so was mostly democratic, allowing for a few bottom lines: Mum got one carte-blanche pick, there would always be one Beatles album, and one by Randy Newman.
Dad saw Newman as a kindred spirit, shouldering the weight of the world and giving voice to it with dry, sardonic humour. He would often put on the best-of compilation, Lonely at the Top, before confronting his least favourite chore: the washing-up.
“Oh, Randy,” he would exhale noisily. “What are we going to do?” It was assumed he was talking about the state of the world, not the dishes.
Newman was such a vivid presence in my family that my sister and I must have been his youngest fans to be just as familiar with his 1972 album Sail Away as with his work for Pixar.
We knew all the words to his songs – about the Holocaust, slavery, the great Mississippi flood of 1927 – before we had any idea what they meant.
We were at least on the same page for Short People, which struck us as hilarious, though others, at the time of its release, saw it as blatant bigotry.
Political Science, about American foreign policy, was our favourite. “Drop the big one now,” we called it, mistaking its chorus for its title.
Caught up in the melodies and the more obvious jokes (“We’ll save Australia / Don’t want to hurt no kangaroo”), his satire mostly went over our heads.
It was only as I got older that I appreciated the cleverness of Newman’s songwriting, and how it may have shaped the humour and worldview of a generation of my family.
One Christmas a few years ago, my mum asked us to write our thoughts on the future in permanent marker on placemats. (Again, for reasons that remain unclear.) Dad, struggling with the nature of the task, wrote “USA: a lost cause.”
Elle Hunt
We love to eat: My aunt’s golden butterscotch
Ingredients
1lb demerara sugar
4oz butter
1 teacup golden syrup
2 tbsp cold water
A pinch of cream of tartar
Icing sugar
Put the butter into a saucepan and melt it slowly over a hot ring. Add the sugar, syrup and water. Bring slowly to the boil, stirring occasionally. Continue boiling until the mixture breaks crisply when a little is tested in cold water in a saucer. Remove from the heat, stir in the cream of tartar and pour into an oiled or greased flat tray. When half set, mark into inch squares. When cold, remove from the tray, break across the marks, dust with icing sugar and store in a tin. I say store, but I don’t think you will store it for long.
The front room door of my childhood 17th-century cob-walled farmhouse looked almost good enough to eat. Last varnished and comb-grained at the turn of the 20th century to resemble the grain pattern of a tree, the initials of the craftsman and a date were just visible beneath the middle panel – AH 1906. His handiwork remained untouched for half a century, resulting in the varnish becoming a richer golden brown with each passing decade. By the time I was nine, in 1956, it resembled, in my imagination, a gigantic slab of my aged maiden aunt’s butterscotch, which she made for me as a special treat, annually, a month before Christmas.
At the end of the afternoon gold-making process, I was given my own small tin. At bedtime, after blowing out the candle or turning down the wick of the Aladdin lamp, I snuggled between cotton sheets, under the wool blankets, eiderdown and the great-grandmother-made patchwork quilt. Next, I removed a gold ingot from my treasure chest. I began to suck slowly, wanting to make the flavour last for ever.
My mother’s voice from the bottom of the stairs, “Brush your teeth again before you go to sleep.”
The golden end to a golden day.
David Hill
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