Still mentioning the war

There are moments when the jokey merchandise on offer to football fans really get on your nerves. And never more so than last week's England games when I started to see those imitations of the Tommy tin hats once worn by British soldiers. Another invasion of Germany. Ho ho. Guardian journos often go to great lengths to escape the caricature of themselves as weepy, lily-livered good-for-nothings. This time, though, I would rather remain one.

The second world war gags disgust me. I am revolted, too, by the fact that the wags who buy the tin hats are so different from the generations who were conscripted and received a thorough education in death. In my experience those people did not usually have any taste for maintaining a hatred of Germany, not even in supposedly comic form.

My dad was on a ship sunk during the second world war, but in the decades until his death in 1999 he never had a hostile word for the enemy. In fact, he rather admired Germany. My father-in-law landed on the Normandy beaches 24 hours after D-Day. He was in that latter wave because he was still a teenager and it seemed kindly to let the youngsters have a fraction more time before they risked being mown down.

His recollections remind me of Spike Milligan's memoirs. He speaks of the hilarious bits of bungling in the British Army and marvels that victory was achieved. There is no residue of animosity towards the Germans.

The famous episode of Fawlty Towers is rightly remembered, but it satirised pitiful British attitudes to Germany and not the Germans themselves. Somehow the point the writers were making got blown away by the gales of laughter. Perhaps we'll eventually learn the lesson by some other means.

I was very taken by Michael Frayn's play Democracy. It is fully conscious of the foibles that afflict politicians, just like everyone else, but there is also a celebration of the replacement of Nazi Germany, in the blink of a generation, with a peace-loving, democratic state that established an ever-growing friendship with its historic enemy France.

That's the good thing about the fans in Tommy hats. Many Germans will probably just smile and hide their pity for these wretches.