Achtung Grandad...and don't mention the war to my nan.

I was watching Hardy Kruger in ‘The one that got away’ yesterday afternoon. You know the movie, he plays a German POW on the run in a rain sodden and very bleak English countryside?
I can always feel my paternal grandfather with me when I’m sat watching these old movies. When I was a kid he’d give me the regular brief hushed messages out of the hearing of my grandmother, which usually went something like, “Good picture on tomorrow night eight o’clock”.
It was like a strange Illuminati code, concise, but containing a kaleidoscope of sensations and anticipations - the rendezvous for the secret Cabal of World War II junkies.

You see, what Gramps was really saying was: ‘There’s a good war film on tomorrow night and I’d like you to come over and watch it with me’. He lived very close, so I could eat my tea and sneak round to his little picture palace for a private screening.
Refreshments were always provided: Madeira cake, smokey bacon crisps and salted peanuts - washed down with industrial quantities of lemonade and cigarette smoke.
I always sat on the white fluffy rug in front of his chair like a faithful dog, the coffee table within easy reach as it buckled under the smorgasbord of snacks.
(Hey give me a break, I can't help it if I was the oldest grandchild, and besides, everybody needs a bit of pampering sometimes eh? Anyway it was only a couple of times a week...)

This man was probably the biggest influence on my childhood, he was like the dad that I didn’t have, the manly but sensitive figure that took an interest in my life; told me about history, to beware of the bogey men, spent long hours helping me construct Airfix kits of Spitfires, Mustangs and Messerschmitt Bf 109’s.

He of course belonged to a different generation (and so did I), today, his passionate encouragement of my interest in ‘Der Vaar’ would probably be termed ‘child abuse’ and/or an unhealthy preoccupation with Thanatos the death instinct. But the older I get, I do now wonder what subliminal synchronicities and resonance’s those experiences had on my still developing psyche - both good and ill.

Personally, at the time, I only felt Eros in my heart and mind for the spectacular visual and emotional drama that regularly assaulted my senses back in that somewhat dowdy and post-coital early ‘70’s period.
My grandfather provided, the colour, the camouflage, the heroes, the eggshell blue aeroplane kits and tall tales that grounded my somewhat diaphanous butterfly soul during my early years.

My dads generation seemed ineffectual and airy fairy in comparison, hung up on their own little neuroses, too busy working and worrying to collect and convey myths, legends and picaresque anecdotes to a wee lad.
Watching war films with my grandfather was akin to sitting around a Palaeolithic campfire with the village elder, being initiated into the social, historical, metaphysical and moral rites of the tribe.

Then of course, there were the sacred texts themselves!
Well, ’Purnells History of the Second World War’ to be precise. A beautiful weekly glossy that Gramps collected for a number of years, and which I spent countless hours leafing through; the strange adult world of babies in gas masks, the bombing of Dresden, a soldier squashed flat by a tank (like a cartoon), the ragged snowdrifts of the dead at Auschwitz, the scorched blistered children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I know, this sounds grotesque now, but as a young kid I was fascinated and intrigued by the ‘forbidden’ freak show. Wow, this was more grisly and far out than all those sad war comics my friends consumed, this was real grown-up stuff! I mean ‘Commando weekly’ - do me a favour.
But also, there was something else too, a feeling of oddity and peculiarity that my young mind couldn’t quite grasp then…or should I say develop.

Years later in my early 30’s, reading Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughter house 5’ and especially Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, I was finally able to understand and articulate that mysterious sensation of childhood.

Beneath the kitsch portrayals of heroism and gallantry as manifested in those war movies, the slick sanitized colour plates of Spitfires and German staff officer uniforms and the fairground freak show - there lay waiting, like a bizarre, brooding mythological animal, the total and utter dark surrealism of a world gone insane.
What I realised as a child on some unconscious instinctive level was that adult human beings (the grown-ups) are capable of behaving like this on a regular basis.

I guess my grandfather did show a certain irresponsibility in leaving me alone for hours with those images, and exposing me in such a massive way to the whole weird, sick carnival of World War II. Bless him.

Maybe that’s his greatest legacy though: he bequeathed me an unerring sense of the existential oddity and precariousness of existence, and the seemingly instinctual potential for cruelty us human beings have.
Maybe his clumsy way of saying, ‘be careful out there’ eh?
I mean shit, thank god we didn’t have Grand Theft Auto way back then – I would have been really fucked – lets have a bit of real life context here.
I prefer my John Wayne meets Sartre hypothesis anyway…or am I reading far too much in to this?

Funny but I do wonder why I fell into the warm embrace of the more cynical, Swiftian school of the arts from a very young age: Vonnegut, Bukowski, Burroughs, Beckett, Francis Bacon…err Black Sabbath? All the ‘B’ people so it seems.

By the way, my grandfather never fought in the war. Maybe he was exorcising something in himself – an irresistible voyeurism generated through a perceived guilt?
Okay I’ll stop now.