Traditional triumph in the board room

It seems that top executive pay in Britain rose by 11% last year, while on average pay packets rose by only 1.7%. That 1.7% is a pay cut in real terms since it isn’t enough to cover inflation.

In 2016 it would have taken a worker on the median wage 157 years to earn as much as a top executive would pick up in a year. There has been progress since those dark days, however. In 2017 the figure had risen to 163 years.

It’s not for me to suggest that a top director isn’t worth 163 times any ordinary person. So I’ll leave it to someone much closer to all these matters. The Guardian quoted Andrew Ninian from the Investment Association, a body representing Fund Managers, not generally amongst the lowest paid themselves:

Investors have repeatedly highlighted their concerns with excessive CEO pay, so it is frustrating that the message does not appear to be getting through to some FTSE 100 boardrooms. This year we have seen more FTSE 100 companies get significant votes against their remuneration reports than in previous years.

So even though shareholders have been voting against these colossal increases, they go through anyway.

If shareholders can’t stop them and executives, who benefit from them, won’t, then who could? 

Government maybe.

Sadly, though Theresa May spoke out loudly for executive pay moderation while she was campaigning for election, she’s been back-pedalling hard ever since becoming PM again. She has, for instance, dropped the proposal to put worker representatives on boards.

So there’s no prospect of any slowing in the drive for ever-higher boardroom pay any time soon. Something that people who backed Brexit ought to think about. You wanted control brought back home? Just look who you’re handing it to.

Not that there’s anything new about any of this. Following my mother’s recent death, I have a huge quantity of photos and correspondence to go through, and even a few books (we gave most away but I kept some). One was a collection of cartoons by the American Peter Arno from the 1940s. I happened to be glancing through it today and came across this one.

‘The motion has been made and seconded that we give
ourselves a raise in salary. All those in favour say “Aye”.’

It seems that the triumph of the board room is by no means unique to our times or indeed to Britain. A tradition honoured by time, you might say.

After all, there’s very little else to honour it, is there?

Is Medicine really a Science?

“If your physician does not think it good for you to sleep, to drink wine, or to eat such and such meats, never trouble yourself; I will find you another that shall not be of his opinion; the diversity of medical arguments and opinions embraces all sorts and forms.”

So wrote Michel de Montaigne over four centuries ago.

Well, things have changed. Today, a growing body of information is attracting a consensus within the medical profession. However, the information is by no means stable. A journal of the Mayo Clinic in the US (its Proceedings) published a study in August 2013 of all the original research articles from the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine over a decade. It found that:

• 1344 articles examined a new or existing medical practice
• Over half of them (56.3%) suggested a new practice superior to an existing practice. This is known as ‘replacement’, where a new treatment is to be preferred to an old one
• Far more worrying, nearly one in nine (10.9%) found that a treatment in common use was inferior to what had preceded it and should be stopped. This is known as a ‘reversal’, where a new treatment is found to be inadequate and practice reverts to an older approach

That’s just one decade and just one journal, even if it is one of the publications with the most impact in medicine.

Maybe that means that Montaigne, if he were living today, would have to change his advice slightly: if you don’t like the advice your doctor’s giving you, you don’t so much have to find another doctor, just wait a bit – before long there’ll be some new advice coming along.

Of course, you do have to survive for as long as it takes to get that new advice.

Bloodletting: once one of the most common of medical practices
Now regarded as not generally beneficial...

What prompted me to think about all this? Why, the new advice from the Lancet, another of the most prestigious medical journals, that salt, against which we’ve been warned for so long and so loudly, for the harm it does to the heart, might actually be beneficial for cardiovascular disease if consumed in moderation.

Doesn’t this remind you of attitudes towards, say, aspirin? It was perceived as a panacea, a cure for practically any disease, when it was first discovered. Then the profession turned sharply against it, above all for its effect on the digestive system. But now the pendulum has swung back and aspirin, in moderation, is recommended for many conditions, and in particular as a preventative for certain heart problems.

As for red wine, I’ve lost track of where we stand now. Is it good for you? Is it bad for you? Maybe I should just take a leaf out of Montaigne’s book and just do what I like and, since I like red wine, keep drinking it.

In moderation, of course.

Naturally, all this progress is based on scientific work. Highly effective, intelligent research is slowly moving us forward. It’s causing us to question old remedies, and sometimes – maybe as often as one time in nine – even new remedies. Which means that medicine is becoming more scientific.

Gone are the days of bleeding patients, as in the eighteenth century, just because that’s what a physician does. After all a scientist might well come along and question the practice. But it seems that could also happen for many of the practices we still use, unlike bleeding. With so much of medicine subject to questioning, I’m not convinced that it’s reasonable to call it a science.

Perhaps it’s just a practice on the way to becoming more scientific…

There’s a great quote attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, though he probably never said it. Asked by a journalist what he thought of Western Civilisation, the story says Gandhi replied that he thought ‘it would be a good idea’.

Medical science? I don’t know what Gandhi would have thought. But to me it seems like it would be another good idea.

Do Jews matter? Or Muslims?

Martin Niemöller, imprisoned by the Nazis

Denmark, once a beacon of tolerance and inclusiveness, has banned the Muslim full-face veil. It also now operates a system of officially designated ghettos, mostly inhabited by immigrants.

The Danish example has animated the far right in Britain, with Boris Johnson, contender for the leadership of the Conservative Party, claiming that, while he doesn’t back a ban, he feels the niqab makes women look like letterboxes or even bank robbers.

Many, even Tories, have denounced the ‘morally empty’ Johnson for encouraging Islamophobia in this way. But he has received outspoken support from Jacob Rees-Mogg, from the hard-right, hard-Brexit wing of the Conservatives. That link between Brexit and Islamophobia is no accident: whatever people may say about ‘taking back control’ or Britain assuming its rightful place in the world, the main motive behind Brexit was xenophobia, and the first target of British xenophobia is Muslims.

The rise of xenophobia is creating a toxic atmosphere in which fundamental values of human rights are rapidly receding. We badly need a force capable of resisting that trend, which is why it’s a tragedy that the British Labour Party, far from fighting this crucial battle, has undermined its own position by failing to refute the charges of antisemitism under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.

Now, I agree with his fans that the scandal is being sustained by right-wing propaganda against Corbyn and Labour. Where I disagree with them is in seeing this as in any way unprecedented or even unusual. Why, in 1924 the first ever Labour government faced a scurrilous campaign of vilification, including the publication (by the Daily Mail, a sewer then as it’s a sewer now) of a forgery, the ‘Zinoviev Letter’, which suggested that the Communist International was working for a Labour victory.

Attacks on Labour come with the leader’s territory. The hallmark of the leadership is its reaction to them. Sadly, the reaction of today’s leadership has been lamentable.

It could have adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism, with all its examples, immediately and in full. It didn’t. It decided that four of those examples would have limited its freedom to criticise the state of Israel. It’s hard to see how: nothing in those examples means that one can’t say, for instance, that the Israeli government’s attitude towards Palestinians is racist and abhorrent.

Corbynistas, however, objected to the four examples as a matter of principle. It had to be principle, since pragmatically it was a senseless decision. Ask most British voters about the Israel-Palestine conflict and it’s likely you’ll be met with ignorance. Those who do have an opinion are likely to come up with a ‘faults on both sides’ kind of argument. They might even say ‘well, Israel has to be able to defend itself against terrorists’. Persuading them that Israeli action goes way beyond legitimate action against terrorism would require a long process of education, and I’m not convinced many voters would be prepared to submit to it.

Oddly, though, the rejection of four examples was not, it turns out, a matter of principle after all. Corbyn has now decided that actually he can accept three of the four examples, so clearly they weren’t that problematic to start with. The suspicion has to be that in time he’ll accept the last one too.

Had he done that at the beginning, the attacks would not have stopped, but at least with swing voters he might have been given the benefit of the doubt. ‘Look, he’s accepted the international definition of antisemitism,’ they might have said, ‘and done it immediately. What more can you ask?’

By doing it late and reluctantly, he just looks truculent and unprincipled. He forfeits the credit he might have won otherwise.

Lousy politics.

The implications are more serious than that, however. After all, it isn’t antisemitism that is the most virulent form of racism in Britain today. It is far less widespread or intense than the Islamophobia which permeates society, as exemplified by Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg. That’s what needs to be resisted before we follow Denmark down the ugly road it has taken.

But how does one resist racism by others when one’s own track record isn’t spotless? Until we’ve cleared ourselves of the charge of antisemitism, Labour can’t claim to lead the fight against racism. Boris may be morally empty, but a counter attack would be far more effective if we’d first secured the moral high ground ourselves.

The toxins run deep. A minority of Labour favours Brexit. Sadly, with his talk of the benefits of a ‘Labour Brexit’, the suspicion is that Corbyn is with that group. That gives it disproportionate power. So it’s unsurprising that the leadership is resisting, despite powerful pressure from the membership, attempts to have the forthcoming Labour Conference debate backing for a second referendum on the EU.

The French equivalent of the saying ‘birds of a feather flock together’ is ‘tell me who you hang out with, and I’ll tell you who you are’. Labour Brexiters are rubbing shoulders with the xenophobes they should be opposing. If they help reinforce racists’ views, they shouldn’t be surprised when they become tarred with that brush themselves. Backing Brexit lands them in the xenophobe camp.

Sadly, while it may only be Jews who are upset with Labour now, it’s Muslims who are facing general hostility. We should be strong in our defence of their rights. And not just for their sake: allow discrimination against the Jews or Muslims today and, who knows, in the long run you too could be the victim of your short-sightedness.

Niemöller adapted to our times

The other Grandfather

As I’ve said before, one of my grandfathers was Nat Bannister, a Jew, a lithographer, and a radical at least in his early days. He spent two years in Dartmoor Prison rather than fight in the First World War.

And then there was my other grandfather. He was far more conventional and definitely not Jewish. I knew him less well, but that makes tracking him down all the more interesting.

He was the son of Mary (or possibly Mary Anne) and Alfred Beeson. Since there's a lot of name-sharing to come, let me make it clear at once that Alfred (without a ‘Leonard’ to his name) was my great-grandfather, my father’s paternal grandfather. I think I would have liked him. The photo I have of him shows him with a winning smile, I find, and though I know this was a studio portrait, I like to think it reveals something of the man within.

Mary (or Mary Anne) and Alfred Beeson
My great-grandmother and great-grandfather

My great-grandfather had an ingenious idea. Britain, when he was a young man, prohibited the importation of live cattle. So Alfred moved to Brussels. He imported cattle from Argentina to Belgium, had them slaughtered there and then re-exported the carcasses for the British butcher’s trade. He did well at it until, sadly, the law in Britain changed and live cattle were allowed directly into the country.

It’s always dangerous to build a business on the current state of any law. It can be changed so easily…

Alfred died in 1903, before he’d even reached the age of 40. That left his elder son, Leonard Alfred, then just 15, as head of the family, still living in Brussels. A huge burden for a mere boy to take on, especially as his mother, grief-stricken, was unable to help.

He rose to the task and saw to the education of his three surviving siblings (one brother had died at age eight, some five years earlier). Though he didn’t believe in too much education, especially for women: his sister Irene told me many years later that she had hoped to go to university, but he had peremptorily forbidden her doing so. A university education? Unnecessary for a woman, he told her.

‘His decisions were final,’ she explained. ‘There was no appeal.’

Leonard Alfred Beeson in the Artillery
and his sister Irene Beeson, cheated of university

When grandfather Nat was in gaol for refusing to fight in the Great War, grandfather Leonard was in the Artillery, serving at the front in France. He was injured twice, once by gas. Yep. You know all the fuss our Western powers make, rightly, about the use of gas as weapons? It was, of course, our ancestors in those Western Powers who first made indiscriminate use of them in World War 1.

The second injury was from shrapnel, and he carried bits of it until his death. Surgeons decided that they couldn’t extract some fragments from his hand, so it kept slowly closing on him for the rest of his life. Keen golfer that he was, in his latter years he had to push the handle of his club into the affected hand because it could no longer open to receive it the usual way.

My father told me that Leonard Alfred’s wife came to visit him in hospital after one of his injuries. She was certain that he had lost a leg, and refused to believe him when he said he hadn’t, thinking he was merely trying to comfort her. Eventually, he had to pull the hospital bed sheets back to reveal two intact, working legs before he could convince her.

She was Eleanor Eileen, whose father was Serbian. He claimed to be a Prince related to the Serbian royal family, although most of us think he was probably a waiter who felt life might treat him better in Britain.

Leonard and Eleanor had to leave Brussels when the German Army invaded Belgium, but they were back there after the war and busied themselves raising a family of three boys and two girls. The last of the boys was called Leonard Alfred though, to distinguish him from his father, they tacked on a Malcolm as his third forename; Leonard Alfred Malcolm Beeson would eventually be my father and my brother’s.

Sadly for Leonard Alfred and his family, having had to flee Brussels once ahead of the Germans in World War 1, they had to do the same all over again in 1940, when World War 2 moved from its ‘phony war’ stage to something much hotter. So unlikely did it seem that things would turn so nasty, that Leonard had gone to England for a golfing weekend in May, only to find himself stranded there with only the clothes in his cae (and presumably his clubs) when Hitler’s troops moved in and Brussels fell again.

Eleanor Eileen Beeson
at 34 rue du Japon, Brussels in about 1936

My father had to get out with his mother on the last train before the Germans arrived. They packed as much as they could, but that wasn’t a lot. Their bags were in the taxi waiting to take them to the station for, I repeat, the last train out when my grandmother suddenly cried out for them to wait. She rushed back into the house and came out with the dustbins. Presumably, she didn’t want to find the house smelling of rubbish when they returned.

They did make it back, after the war, and there certainly wasn’t any rubbish in the house. In fact, there was nothing at all. The place had been completely looted while they were away.

My father was pleased they caught the last train.

‘The second-to-last train was strafed by German fighters,’ he told me, ‘and there were a lot of casualties on board.’

Leonard Alfred Beeson in the Fleet Air Arm

My father never understood how this happened, but Leonard Alfred Beeson, with his artillery background, somehow managed to join the Fleet Air Arm in World War 2. That’s the air branch of the navy. He was 52 in 1940 so he was in an administrative position, but had plenty to do. When my father visited him on his air base in Scotland, he found that he’d laid out a nine-hole golf course on a patch of waste ground at the back of the aerodrome.

In their hurry to get out of the house in Brussels, one of the belongings my grandmother and my father left behind was my grandfather’s manuscript of the great book he’d written. Its subject? The solution of the ‘Jewish Problem’.

As kids, my brother and I saw little of our paternal grandparents. Certainly far less than of our maternal ones. It may be that they weren’t that interested in their grandchildren; they may have seen just as little of my cousins. But might it have been because my father had contributed to the ‘Jewish Problem’ by marrying a Jew?

Who knows? There’s certainly no way of finding out now. Leonard Alfred died in 1967, Eleanor Eileen in 1971.

All I know is that when a non-Jew, particularly in that era, proposed solutions to the ‘Jewish Problem’, they were seldom of a kind to bring much comfort to the Jews…

Still, I suppose it’s sad his book was lost, a tragedy I’m told he always felt. Sad, for him I mean. I’m not sure it was such a loss for the rest of us.

LAM Beeson, my father, with his mother Eleanor and his father LA Beeson
The warrior torch handed on a generation.
By sheer good luck it didn’t reach me

Freedom or rootlessness

It was a strange feeling setting the address for my mother’s flat into my car’s GPS for the last time. Even stranger turning up there and seeing it completely bare, just a space to be filled, without any of the jumble that had previously given it character and expressed her own.

They were ambivalent feelings. Once you’ve travelled the same route two or three hundred times, it’s a relief to know you won’t have to do it again. But the sense of relief is tinged by the sadness of the end of an era, when the one person you knew before you were even born has gone for good.

Good to be spared the drive. But I’ll miss the lunches

The death of my mother cut one of only two ties that kept me in Britain. My wife Danielle and I had decided we would, in time, move to Spain for her retirement and the rest of my working life – my job is one I can do from anywhere in Europe and, fortunately, I took the opportunity to take French nationality fifteen years ago, as an insurance policy against Brexit, which already seemed likely all that time ago.

The other tie to Britain was Danielle’s job. By coincidence, she was caught shortly after my mother’s death by the latest wave of redundancies in her company.

It wasn’t a fate unique to herself. A few dozen of her colleagues are also going, and two other companies on her business estate are laying off, while a fourth, from Germany, is moving its entire operation back home. Brexiters are always telling me that leaving the EU would free Britain to forge a powerful new presence on the world stage. If that’s so, it seems that we’re moving a long way back to get a runup to that seductive leap forward.

And that’s before Brexit has even happened.

With Danielle’s redundancy, the last constraint on our leaving has been removed. We’re free now, free to enjoy that freedom of movement that the EU guarantees and Britain, anxious to exclude immigrants, has rejected. Freedom feels good.

But the other side of the coin is a sense of rootlessness. For all its insularity and inclination to look backwards at a distant past that never happened, I liked my country. While my mother was alive, I had family here. While Danielle had her job, we both had livings here. Before Brexit, it kept its xenophobes in check.

Now those factors that formed something of an anchor have gone. Of course, the important thing with an anchor is not simply to drag it and end up adrift in increasingly rough seas. As we prepare for Spain, I like to think that instead we’ve deliberately hauled our anchor up, to set a new and more hopeful course.

After all, Spain is currently showing a much firmer attachment to liberal values than Britain. Spain is taking in migrants rather than leaving them to drown in the Mediterranean. Spain recently brought down an incompetent Conservative government to replace it with a Centre-Left one that might do rather better. A course that leads there strikes me as a good one to follow.

Our first step on that way is to put the house on the market. That, too, is a little ironic. We spent quite a lot just a year ago to make it far more comfortable. We won’t get the money back. We just have to take comfort from our enjoyment of a more pleasant house for the best part of a year. We have a track record of doing that: we spent a small fortune doing up a flat in Germany before moving back to England.

We’re far from alone in deciding that it’s time to move. The ‘For Sale’ or ‘To Let’ signs have been mushrooming all around our neighbourhood, though more especially in the streets with the cheaper housing. That’s where many immigrants from Poland or Eastern Europe live, and I wonder if it’s they who are going. After all, they can hardly feel entirely at ease in the foreigner-hostile environment Brexit has created.

'For Sale' or 'To Let' all the way down the street

So much property on the market could make selling our place more difficult. And time’s running out. With a hard Brexit looking increasingly likely, I can imagine that getting out after next March will prove far more difficult still.

It’s a shame. Britain was fun when it was more open, when so many – never everyone, of course, but many all the same – revelled in its multi-culturalism. It’s sad to see it declining, Trump-like, into a state that prefers walls to bridges. Walls that too many Brits think they can hide behind to keep the world out.

The Brexit illusion from which, sadly, they’re likely to suffer a painful awakening.

Progress of a rebel freed from gaol

The young man who was released from Dartmoor Prison at the end of the First World War, and who would later be my grandfather, had been a radical even before he went in. It was what led him to the pacifism for which he was gaoled. And he emerged, after a year or two in the company of such men as the philosopher Bertrand Russell, even more radical than he went in.

Radical Nat on the right. On a postcard from
'yours rebelliously Henry B Offell'

A radical though not quite a Communist. My grandmother, Yetta, had joined the Party and had become quite an activist. My grandfather, Nat or Norman, did attend some meetings though he never joined. One of the meetings he went to was chaired by Yetta. She was an attractive young woman and he decided he wanted to get to know her better.

She had, however, emerged from the aftermath of the war a woman saddened well beyond her eighteen years. She’d been engaged to a young man who managed to survive the entire war, only to come home and succumbing to the terrible flu epidemic that followed. So,  when Nat approached her, Yetta was still recovering from a devastating loss. 

Did that make her more or less open to his advances? Perhaps a little of both. They were engaged relatively soon, but the road to marriage was a stormy one. She told me that on one evening they had such a row in a street on the way home that she tore off her engagement ring and threw it on the pavement at his feet, before storming off.

He, instead of following her at once, got down on his hands and knees and searched for the ring. It was a good ring and he wanted her to accept it. He could settle the argument later.

They were married in 1921. On 8 September, just one week before Yetta turned 21. A week later and she wouldn’t have needed her parents’ consent, but she insisted on getting it, though they were more than a little reluctant: Nat was from a far poorer background than hers, daughter as she was of a skilled craftsman, a shoemaker specialising in orthopaedic shoes for injured or otherwise deformed feet.

Yetta and Nat at their wedding in 1921

He’d picked up the profession in which he’d started before the war, lithography, and had reached a level of expertise such that his company asked him to go into sales and represent them to clients rather than simply do the lithographs himself. It meant that he was able at last to emerge from the backbreaking poverty in which he’d spent his childhood. He still got off his bus from and to home a stop early to save a penny on the fare, but he was soon earning enough to be able to clear the mortgage on a house within four years, something that’s practically unthinkable in England today. He moved his family into a modest house in the new outer London district of Hampstead Garden Suburb, where many Jews entering a middle-class existence were moving.

A Jewish boss of mine once said that to make a man a Conservative, you had to give him something to conserve. Rebellious Nat may once have been, but as the years rolled by, he found himself in ever greater sympathy with the British Establishment. Besides, when it came to the Second World War, he felt that the nature of an enemy led by Hitler meant that a Jew had to abandon pacifism and do what he could to overthrow that violently anti-Semitic regime.

He was too old for combat, but he could volunteer for the Air Raid Protection service, which he enthusiastically did. He knew what Air Raids meant, if only as a result of attempting to travel in to his office in the City of London one day, only to be turned back four stops before his on the Underground. The city had taken a pasting the night before and most of the buildings had been burned out, his company’s included. There was no way through to it.

So, at the end of the Second World War, unlike the First, Nat was far closer in sympathy to the mainstream of British society. And the process continued, notably after the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. My grandparents were never practising Jews (a more religious uncle refused to visit them because they’d allowed bacon into their house), but their sympathies were with the Jews of Israel nonetheless. The result was a continued drift away from the radical Left to which they had both belonged at one time.

A good grandfather with his grandsons in the fifties
Just a bit more staid...

‘I’ve given up reading The Guardian,’ Yetta once told me to explain why she was taking the Conservative Daily Telegraph, ‘because the Guardian keeps writing pieces so critical of Israel.’

I haven’t the hard data to support my view, but it feels to me that this has been a trend in the Jewish community. Radical in the 1920s, strongly pro-Labour in the fifties and sixties, its centre of gravity is with the Tories today – perhaps their more liberal wing, but Tory nonetheless.

I’m not sure where they would stand on the scandal over anti-Semitism in the Labour Party today. I imagine it would only have been the last straw for them. Among those of us who remain linked with the Jewish community, however tenuously, only a minority stay loyal to Labour.

For my part, I wish we could recapture the time when Jews like my grandparents could be counted on to support the Left. But I regret still more that many Jews no longer feel comfortable in the Labour Party. I’d like to see the first problem solved, but I believe something will have died in Labour’s soul if it can’t solve the second.

War record

Flying log entries

20.9.44. No. 18. Operation Holland: 20 containers: 4 panniers. Heavy flak damage – B/A wounded. Crash landed Alost Belgium.

Those terse words are a flying log entry by the man, then 23 and a navigator in the Royal Air Force, who would later become my father.

It took a while for my father to tell us about his eighteenth mission. Perhaps at first he felt we were too young. Perhaps it took time before he could talk about it in a matter-of-fact way, even make light of it. But eventually he did.

20 September was the fourth day of the disastrous military enterprise known as Operation Market Garden, a fictionalised version of which appeared in the film A Bridge Too Far. The brainchild of British Field Marshall Montgomery, its aim was to drop paratroops at three points the furthest of which would be at Arnhem with its bridge across the Rhine. Seizing that bridge would open the road into Germany for Allied forces.

The success of the mission depended on ground forces advancing at speed towards the three airborne drops. Unfortunately, planners had seriously underestimated the strength of German forces near Arnhem, and hopelessly overestimated the quality of the road the army would have to move along to relieve the paratroops.

Ultimately, the British airborne troops would suffer terrible losses and few of the survivors would escape capture.

My father was serving with 196 squadron of the RAF, which specialised in airborne troop operations. He was already out on the first day, 17 September:

No. 16. Operation Holland: 1 Horsa Glider: Flak damage

The gliders the squadron was towing, he told me, were carrying anti-tank shells.

‘Unfused?’ he asked a glider pilot.

‘Oh, no, there’s no time to fuse them on the ground. We carry them fused.’

It gave my father great respect for the glider pilots to learn that. One bullet in their load would precipitate a massive explosion, that would certainly kill the pilot. It might, indeed, do no good at all to the towing plane too.

As the log entry shows, my father’s plane was hit by flak – anti-aircraft fire – even on that first mission, but not so seriously as to cause serious damage. He was out on the second day too and suffered no damage. It was beginning to feel like an easy run. The squadron had received a new draft of ground engineers, and a bunch of them asked to come out with the planes since it was all proving so easy. That was strictly against regulations, but they flew out anyway – and very few of them came back.

Then came day 3. The 20th of September.

It was on the return flight that my father’s plane flew over a hospital, clearly marked with red crosses. He saw a skylight begin to open in the roof.

‘Oh, oh,’ he thought, ‘that doesn’t look good.’

A few seconds later anti-aircraft shells were flying towards them. He watched as they began to punch holes in a wing, each hit a little closer to the fuselage where he and the rest of the crew were sitting. They were able to fly out of range before any fatal damage was done to them, but the engines then began to fail, one by one. Once three had stopped and they were down to one, the pilot announced that they weren’t going to get home and that he was going to crash land instead.

The RAF didn’t have enough flying crew, so many had to play more than one role. My father, as well as his principal role as navigator was technically co-pilot as well. He asked the pilot whether he’d like him in the co-pilot’s seat to help with the landing, but the pilot said he could manage and asked him to go back and sit with the crew.

They sat in the main body of the plane, their backs against the sides, their feet braced against each other’s.

The pilot landed in a field, without the undercarriage down. The plane skidded across the rough ground and the stress broke the fuselage open, so stones and dust and bits of vegetation showered the men inside.

Finally, the plane came to a halt and my father went forward to see how the pilot was doing. He found him unhurt, but he plane had hit a tree at the end of its wild rid, and the trunk had cut the co-pilot’s seat in two. Had the pilot accepted my father’s offer of help, he would certainly have been killed and I would not now be writing this account.

‘Crash landed Alost Belgium’ the log book reads. Alost was well behind the Allied lines, so there was no risk of being captured by German forces. Instead, a British jeep turned up soon after to investigate the crash, and the crew was shipped off to hospital in Brussels.

They’d all survived. All but one was unhurt. ‘B/A wounded’ my father recorded in his log book. The reality was rather starker than that.

During the time the plane had been losing power and altitude, the pilot asked my father to go forward to the gondola where the bomb aimer, who doubled as the forward gunner, lay during missions. A shell had exploded near his position and blown him, from his prone position, to sitting upright against the steps that led into the gondola. His head was a mass of blood.

My father sat on the top steps with the injured man’s head between his knees. British aircrew wore leather helmets which could be peeled off. My father started on the grisly task.

‘I froze at one point. I was seized by an irrational fear that if I got his helmet off, his head would fall apart.’

It didn’t. But the bomb aimer eventually lost his sight.

A young airman in the making

On 20 September 1944, my father had been 23 for just five days. The bomb aimer was probably about the same age, perhaps even younger. The loss of his sight, and the threat to the lives of the entire crew, was caused by fire from a gun doubtless manned by men as young as they were.

No wonder European countries decided after the war that it was time to set up a union that might prevent young people ever being called to do that to each other again.

Strange to think that so much is hiding behind the laconic message: ‘20.9.44. No. 18. Operation Holland: 20 containers: 4 panniers. Heavy flak damage – B/A wounded. Crash landed Alost Belgium.’