CHAPTER 3 - THE OLD SOLDIER

This short, true story began one evening while I was passing by a chip-shop in Maple Cross, Hertfordshire, with Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits filling my ears with the songs I love. Every time I hear ‘Romeo and Juliet’ it gives me a sense of symbiosis, and I think of Bill and Mary, who this story is about.

That evening, in autumn 1976, I had packed up my car with everything I would need for a fishing trip, and my plans had been set in stone for many months. I had seen a large carp grazing in the margins of the lake, owned by Rickmansworth Conservative Club, where I regularly fished, with the early evening sun sending a distant light on the tranquil water when I went to the lake after a day in the gymnasium. I had seen that carp many times during past trips, and I wanted to catch it.

Before my story begins, I will just mention that that night, after the event described in this story, I caught the biggest carp I ever caught. A wonderful blessing, but it fades into insignificance, compared to the other heart-warming events of that evening.

Now, back to why this story is so dear to my heart.

As I drove through Maple Cross towards the lake, I was filled with eager anticipation for the giant leviathan I hoped I would land on that trip.

I passed the village ‘chippy’ as I usually did and noticed a scuffle. I wasn’t quite sure what was taking place, but it looked like a fight outside the chip-shop door. I pulled into the shopping centre, jumped out of my car, and rushed towards the scuffle.

There was an old man lying on the ground, bleeding from his nose and mouth, with blood trickling down his lined, red, wrinkled cheek, onto the pavement. He had been surrounded by a gang of youngsters; the oldest no more than eighteen. They were laughing and walking away from the scene with confident swaggers, leaving the old man to try to stand, sharing a newspaper of the remains of someone’s fish and chips, enough to feed them all. They seemed ‘chuffed’, but the old man was certainly in shock and was shaking uncontrollably amidst the spilt chips and pieces of cod.

My instinct was to attend to the old man first, but because the gang was about fifty metres away and disappearing around the corner of the block of shops, I ran and grabbed the ‘coolest’ member of the gang. They didn’t expect that, and the rest of the gang went to run off.

“Wait there and don’t move,” I shouted.

The group of ‘thugs’ stood stock-still while I tended to the injured old man as they slowly surrounded the scene and looked into his eyes, their faces not so happy anymore!

I assessed the gentleman, who was eighty-plus, and after applying first aid he was set and ready, even smiling when I offered to buy him a replacement bag of fish and chips. Some of his supper for two had littered the pavement in the scuffle. He told me he bought the same supper every Friday evening for him and his wife.

I helped him to my car and asked him to wait for a few moments while I addressed the gang!

I said very little except that I wanted them to give me a ‘phone number, that I could contact one of them with later, which one of them did, albeit hesitantly. I could actually sense a glimmer of niceness in a few of their faces. Something to be found in most young people's faces when they become reflective of their actions after the event, which there always is when youngsters are growing up. Mick asked if I was planning to tell his parents. Of course, I said I was not! Mick reluctantly gave me his number.

I drove Bill to his home, walked along the pathway to his bungalow door, about five hundred metres from the row of shops he had visited all his life, and rang the doorbell. A beautiful smartly dressed woman opened the door, a similar age to Bill, and she was clearly upset when she saw her husband, but he reassured her that he was fine.

“It’s only blood, my dear. I have seen a lot worse”!

I looked around their humble living room and my eyes settled on a sideboard on which were placed the treasures of Bill and Mary, a box of medals, a couple of spent bullet cases and a few photographs, then rather sepia-brown, of life a hundred years ago. There was also a photograph of a young child. I wondered!

After a cup of thick, brown army-tea, and another look around the living room at the many photographs on the wall, many of soldiers in uniform, Bill began to share his story. This is what he told me.

He started by asking me to guess how old he was. Wanting to be kind and flattering after what he had been through, I suggested he was about 70.

“What. That’s a kind gesture young man. I am much older than that, and I feel great. Please don’t be too harsh on the lads. They are only youngsters and were just thoughtless with their actions and meant me no harm. There was a time when I could have taken them all on, one by one. I was born when Queen Victoria was near the end of her reign! I was a young man in 1914 when I volunteered for the infantry, to accompany my friends to France as the ‘Jerries’ needed a kicking! I was frightened, but we all had to do our bit, didn’t we? I could never have stayed at home. My dad was in the Boer War and lost a leg, so I owed it to him to be a man! In 1916 I was in the Somme and there was a lot of gas flying around and bullets and loads of shrapnel”.

He lifted his trouser-leg and revealed a thin, scarred, but clearly once emaciated left leg and pointed to where the shrapnel had lodged.

“It used to be in my hip, but over the last few years it has drifted down to my leg. It gives me no trouble".

I was sucking back the tears, and Mary, his loving wife, held his hand with her beautiful, think, silky hands, ever so softly, and I placed my hand on top of theirs and felt the smooth silkiness of Mary’s tiny hand.

“The bombs were a bloody nuisance and very loud, deafening in fact, and I never really got my hearing back. I was blinded by the gas for some days, just like Hitler was as a young corporal in the same battle; but I never met him, thank heavens. I still only have limited vision, but I can see through my now well-used, fuzzy ‘lookers’ enough to know that my Mary is still as beautiful as she ever was when I married her”.

Mary laughed and squeezed Bill’s hand tightly as she smiled and wrinkled up her nose, emanating a rather gentle smile on her beautiful face.

I noticed Bill’s left eyelid was twitching and on close inspection I could see that he had a glass eye!

The rest of the story is very sad, so I won’t tell it here, but the following week after I telephoned Mick, we met at the chippy, and I invited him to come fishing with me after a bag of chips, to try and help him find a hobby. He agreed, rode to meet me by the chippy, and came with me to the lake, with his gang following on their bikes.

I parked up and walked to the lakeside with Mick and his cohorts carrying some of my fishing gear to the north side of the lake where we saw an old man sitting on a fishing basket, shaking, but eager to see Mick. It was Bill!

What happened next made Mick and Bill close friends for many years until Bill passed away, the year Mick graduated from medical school. It took a couple of hours for Bill to tell us more of his life story, while Mick, and the now peaceful and tear-jerked youngsters, sat on the bankside, transfixed, listening to every syllable of Bill’s story.

Bill had been an infantry soldier in World War I and had been in action at The Somme for several weeks. He lost friends to bombs, shrapnel, disease, and machine-gun fire, and had struggled in water-filled muddy trenches where he had seen many of his friends lose their limbs through trench foot and many other injuries. One of his close friends had been through weeks of battle, had charged at the enemy, helped his colleagues, and won the respect of his friends and the company officers, only to meet his maker by falling backwards into the trench that had been his home, and breaking his neck as he was ‘going over the top’! He was a hero, a man who fought for our freedom, an old man who fought so that the youngsters of today would live

without fear and buy their chips in safety! “He was my best ever buddy”.

Mick was a regular visitor to Bill’s home from that day, and often took him a bag of chips, an ironic gesture!

There is always good in people, both young and old, and it is times like these that life reveals a window that the young can gaze through; and the old too!

Mick certainly saw the inner-being of Bill, who was once like him, a strong young man with great potential. Such a hero Bill was to become in Mick's eyes, even after he passed away.

I lost contact with Mick until 1983 but kept in touch with Bill until he passed.

Mary also passed away age 101 and was the proud wife of a very great man.

I was privileged to have been able to hold in my hand, a card from the Queen, just a month after her one-hundredth birthday, when I last visited her!

I never got to see her or Bill again, but Michael George Marsh (Mick), retired in 2016, after a successful career as a GP! Is life not a great teacher?

RIP. Sergeant William Thomas Edward Montgomery, MM, and bar. (BATTLES - Mons. Neuve Chapelle, Ypres. Gallipoli)