Stephen McGann (14:56)
When he knew they were going to go out the next day and he knew they were all locked into camp and he told one story to me I find very moving. He was very religious, he was a devout Catholic and he was so wanting to have holy communion to make his peace with God before he went that he did a very uncharacteristic thing. He leapt over the fence and went AWOL and went to a nearby church he knew as a Catholic church. He said, I just had to do it. I had to do it. And he went over and he had mass and he had Communion and he came back to the gate and they said the whole, who goes there? So what the hell are you doing out, Scouse? Because that's what they used to always call him. And he explained, and the guy just said, quick, get him. But then he's floating around in the middle of the channel and it's terrible weather, so they delay for a day. He said, the poor soldiers who were coming with us from the 50th, they were seasick as anything you find gradually when it's time to go in the morning, he's due there only 30 minutes after, at zero hour. So they drop them down from the ship into the landing craft and then they set that about five, six miles out. Then they send them in. So they're down, they're approaching the beach. They're all down. They're coming towards the Aromanche area on Gold. And the first time he encounters war, the first thing, he hears shells coming over and he talks about the heat off the shells coming from the HMS Ajax landing over there, and that's very encouraging. But then the mortars and the bullets start. He said to me, when you look through the armor plating, it's like balsa wood. It was like balsa wood inside. He thought, this isn't going to do any good. We got to get out of here, you know. So now as they're approaching, they're under fire. They've pitched too far out and they have to open the hatch. They're under fire and they have to open the hatch when they're still out and they pitch right into the water. They have to go over into the water. And so my father talks about the friends of his who died. So the very, very first experience with the reality of war is such a common one. Absolute horror and confusion. He said, I got into the water and managed to hold my gun up. Some of them didn't. I watched some with very heavy packs drown. So that's before he even gets out of the. He gets to the. To the beach, gets behind one of these triangular things on the beach and keeps his head down. I said, what was that like? What were you seeing? What were you? And he. The thing I never forget is he took a breath in and he paused and he took another breath in. He said, son, war is a terrible Thing, a terrible, terrible thing. I have never, to the day I die, I never forgotten. The way he said that became an act of. So you think about people's almost performances in that moment, what they see in their eyes, the horror they truly recall. He watched a good friend of his take a bullet in the back by accident from the British. Because it's utterly said, it's utter confusion. There's horror, there's people running around, there's people screaming. Everybody's hiding behind these defenses. There's already wrecked tanks, there's bits and pieces on the beach, the beach is a mess. So what he then has to do that classic thing. And it was, it was brilliantly put once by Max Hastings and he described what it must take for a young soldier to be on the fire like that in Normandy and to have the courage to put their head up. When every human instinct in your body says, stay where you are, stay exactly where you are, you might get away with this. You might get to see your mum, you might get to breathe the air again. And what he did is he stood up, turkey's gone. And he started to move forward. The stories then come thick and fast, which he told, which I put the pieces of the jigsaw together over the years. But he managed to get up to. I don't know if there were walls or dunes actually, he managed to get up to somewhere where he then said there was a point of attack where the Germans were not far away. And so there was an attack on. He checked his radio and it was shot to bits. So his radio was useless. So his primary function of setting up a beach signal station was spent. And so then the most useful thing he could do was take that off and offer any soldiering and assistance to anybody else there. And that's when he, in great Liverpool fashion, managed to bag and nick some booty from the day, because he managed to procure. This is how close he was to the enemy, because he managed to procure. Procure German field goggles. And my father always loved the binocular. All of his life he loved the nice binocular. But listening to him was quite funny because in the days when he was more light hearted, if you like about it, he said, you know what, these were great binoculars. They were great, these binoculars, proper Nazi binoculars. So he was obviously, from what I know, he was up there with the enemy. They're engaging with people over the way and a stick grenade comes over and the people next to him shouted a danger sign. He saw it too late. He turns his body in a defensive position. But they. The grenade explodes nearby him. He gets 50 separate shrapnel wounds up his. Up his body. When I was a kid, he used to show me he still had the scars at the top of his body. He turned in a natural defensive posture, took all of this pretty much full force on the side of his body. And then he was bleeding out on the beach and he was in big trouble. The next is understandably confusing, but he said, I remember coming in and out of consciousness and he said every time he cried out, everyone has these battle rations of morphine. They have these little morphine files. And he'd say, some bloody medic had given me morphine every time. And it's a funny truth that when he got back to Britain, he said, you know what Nelly did for me, lad, don't you? I said, what? He said, I had to cold turkey when I got back to Britain. Some nurse, he said there was a nurse from the Caribbean, like a West Indian nurse, who had to sit with him for days while he cold turkey because he was addicted to the opiates that in a battle situation they just, just fed him with loads of. No one was taking like a log of any of these things. So he was in a haze of opium and confusion. The next thing he really knew, he wakes up in Leicester Royal Infirmary and there's been a clerical error. Instead of Liverpool Infirmary, they sent him to Leicester Infirmary. So his mother and his brother thought he was dead. When he woke up, he was in a ward with different servicemen. From what I can make out, his mum didn't know where he was. But over the next few days, the servicemen around him were all witness to what they all knew was a miracle happening. My father was a recipient of a top secret drug that literally saved his life. He woke up in a hospital, which was one of those nominated by the Ministry of Defence by the top secret penicillin program for the stocks of treatment. Lucky him. He woke up in this infirmary where they did happen to have treatment. And he said, what happened was they used to sit on each other's beds and they'd look at each other's wounds on their arms and on their legs and the wounds would be healing. There's this wonderful image of all these guys going, have you seen this, Scouse? Look at this. They were the first vanguard of the antibiotic age. They were the first ones whose bodies were completely open to it without any antibiotic resistance to it, so miracles could take place. Then he was deeply wounded and this thing saved his life and he held it all of his life that this miracle had been given to him and gifted to him, you know. And this conversation I had with him once began with you lot, your generation, they don't understand. They don't know they're born. You know, the classic old person. He said, you pop these pills for antibiotics like they're going out of fashion. He said, you don't understand what you've got in your hands. But alongside all of this, the shadow of all of this to his duty, his work, his service, his wounds. And, you know, nearby me now, right next to me, I have his wounding certificate, you know. And they describe the injury. Shrapnel wounds of the left arm, left leg, right thigh and abdomen. Very terse, very simple. And that gave him certificate to be demobbed. But in the shadow of all of that was something he could never talk about, something they called anxiety neurosis. What happened to him then? The aftermath has happened now. We understand it so much. In post traumatic stress back then, they didn't treat anybody. So you come and you do your duty, you go through this tumultuous experience. You're a kid of 20. Next thing they're. They're stamping something on his form which they don't understand very well, they don't treat very well. And for my father, in his almost Victorian sense of rectitude and duty is an appalling stain on him. The idea that it was any weakness or inferred frailty or weakness in him was frankly a secret he carried to his grave. I found most of those things out indirectly through my mother. And later through some of the research I did. My mother discovered something about his medical record which were imparted against all kinds of medical confidentiality. The doctor of the time tried to give a context to help my mother understand my father's depressive moods. My father's rigidity with certain ways in which he had to code. He had to sort of make strict behavior in the house. He had to control the house in a certain way or felt it was a question of control. He felt more in control of the thing. This is my own feeling, but it's a terrible. A terrible injustice in a way that what happened as a natural consequence, what maybe therapy could have helped or a little bit of normalization afterwards could have helped. He was scarred with for the rest of his life and carried a kind of shame for it, an undeserved shame for it, which he took forward, which I never really understood when I was younger, but took forward on his. On his service on that day. He never kept hold of his medals. He had a funny relationship with them, like many servicemen do, and part of it was this shame. And if you think about those experiences, 24 hours in a young man's life could have such a shadow of. Across an entire life. And that's my dad's story, that's the way he had to go on. Because what they did in their generation was they had to go on with him through all the pain that was suffered and a marriage that was sort of overshadowed by depression and melancholy in that way later on, through all of their good days and their bad days. When he was on his deathbed, my mum said, he took my hand near the end and he held it tightly and he said, I'm sorry, love, I'm really sorry. And she said, joe, you don't have to apologize. You don't have to apologise for anything. And it's making me tear up now, because he really didn't have to apologize for anything. That generation, that generation and what they then were told they had to do. The disparity between the shibboleth they'd been given about what a daring do empire man has to do, and the complexity of their life and their service and their courage and their. It's just appalling, you know. And what she was saying to him was that. And I can honestly say that at least they did make real peace with that at the end. They did understand that. And my pain is that he didn't quite live long enough to really understand our advances in knowledge. He would have heard, for instance, the way people like the British Legion and the ex servicemen are now able to talk about these things. I think he would have grown very proud of his service. I think as he would have got older, I think he would have been someone who would have made peace with that. I think he would have found a way back to put it all in place. I think it would have been nice if he'd had that. One other sad upshot of the antibiotic age he was a vanguard of. For him, it was just slightly ultimately too late. My father was born in 1924 and I found out to my agony much later in my research that what killed him, what actually killed my father, was a disease that started in his system when he was a child, and it was called rheumatic heart disease. Way back when he was a kid, in the little tenements where he lived, where his mother worked as a laundress, he must have got streptococcal throat infection. Simple. My son got that infection and you take him down to the doctor, you get some antibiotics, it goes away and we go on with our lives. It's every day to us now. But back then, a minority of the kids the streptococcus would travel down to make rheumatic fever a more substantial problem. So a minority of those kids would get rheumatic fever and a minority of those kids, the rheumatic fever would damage the heart valves and they work like a time bomb. When he was 60 years old, he died too soon because is Mitchell valve gave way. And what you've got to understand is this was a commando. This is a man who'd had a problem with his heart from childhood and had done all those exercises in Al Makary, had gone onto the beaches, had played football and even when he was 40, so 50, he was a fit man. But he was struck down by something. And the only reason is ultimately he wasn't lucky because he was born in 24 rather than 64.
