When my mum’s dad Granddad Cheetham was in his eighties he sold the house in Aughton, he and his second wife Alice had moved into sheltered housing in Ormskirk. They seemed to be doing all right but soon Granddad was not very happy. He and Alice were not getting on very well, she wanted her share of the sale of the house. Granddad was quite frail and he had had a couple of falls too. Mum said he could come and live with her in her house now that there was space after the twins had both got married. I helped collect his things and moved his few belongings over to mum’s. He had his own room and he could listen to his talking books as he was registered blind by this time. He still liked a drink on a Sunday lunch time and I came over each Sunday and took him down to the Stanley Institute where I went to the cinema as a child. He told me to call him Bert not Granddad. He liked to talk about how he had been in the first world war but would not go into great detail about what he had seen. He had only been eighteen at the end of the first world war so what he had seen as a young man I would suppose had a great effect on him.
After the first war he had stayed in the army where he had gone over to India and the North west frontier or Afganistan as it is now. He had been there when Prince David, the prince of Wales, the present queens uncle, was over there too. He later became Edward VIII and abdicated. Granddad was wounded in a fight with the natives and had a sword slash to his upper left arm. He was operated on by a surgeon whilst over there called Major Crawford, he was something to do with the famous Crawford’s biscuit company. He lost most of the muscle in his upper arm but they managed to save the arm by pulling the muscles from his lower arm up and sewing the two ends together. He could not bend his elbow very well but he still had his arm. One of the souvenirs he picked up was a brass Buddha that sat on the mantelpiece of my mum’s. It is a statue of Buddha as the fat older man sat in the lotus position and stands about five inches tall. It never seemed to tarnish no matter how long it went without a polish. Mum later gave this to me to keep for my son Nathan, who now owns it.
When Bert came home he got a job at Hattersley’s Brass Foundry and he joined the territorial army which was based in Bootle. He was an engineer and he trained as a mechanic attached to an armoured unit. They worked on scout cars or Bren gun carriers and at the start of the second war his unit was mobilised. All the other members of the unit were young men who were in there twenties or thirties. Since he was born in 1899 when war broke out he was forty years of age, usually too old to go to war. The lads in the unit said they could not go to fight without “Pop” as they called him, who was going to maintain the vehicles for them? He volunteered to go along with the rest. In 1941 he ended up in the western desert with the Desert Rats fighting Rommel and the German army. He would tell me stories about the sand storms when you could not even see your hand in front of your face or how he had to check inside his boots every time before putting them on in case of scorpions. He said in the desert sand got into everything. All the rations had to be stored in airtight containers. They could not use grease on the tracks of the tanks and Bren gun carriers as it would get clogged up with the sand and grind away all the metal. They had to use graphite powder as a lubricant instead. He had fought under Montgomery and was at Tobruk when Rommel was eventually stopped. He even went over to Sicily when the allies invaded Italy.
When he came home he went back to working in the brass foundry in Ormskirk and stayed there until he retired in 1964. He told me the secret to surviving in life was to keep your head down, no matter what. Never do anything that will draw attention to yourself, just get on with it and you will survive. I really enjoyed having a quiet pint or two with him on a Sunday lunch time. Sadly he passed away in 1987, he was an inspiration to have gone through three wars and still survived to raise his family.
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