A eulogy for my father

Lionel Raymond Harvey

11th March 1922 - 21st January 2018

Lionel Raymond Harvey was born on 11th March 1922 at 41 Cobourg Road, Montpelier, Bristol, the second son of Graham, a railwayman and veteran of the Somme, and Ida. His elder brother, also Graham, had died the previous year at a few weeks old; his sister, Audrey, was born 18 months after him.

Before long the family moved to Herbert Street in Totterdown, and then, in 1926, to the new council estate in upper Horfield. One of Dad’s earliest memories was of moving day. His father, riding on the van, assumed he was with his mother; his mum, busy with baby Audrey, was certain he was with his father, and four-year-old Lionel was left behind at the old house, to be taken in by neighbours until his parents realised and re-crossed the city to retrieve him.

Life wasn’t always easy in Macaulay Road; in particular, money was in short supply. Dad remembered his mother hiding a jar of Shippams fish paste behind the skirting board to avoid a confrontation with his father, and he vowed at a young age never to argue about money with his future wife. Once married, he duly handed over his pay packet to my mother every Friday.

On his seventh birthday Dad was given a football, and instantly he was the most popular lad on the street. He became an agile player with swift reactions; aged 13, while working at his first job in a shoe shop down the Gloucester Road, he trapped a rat under his foot and held it there until the shop cat could be found. He and his father regularly watched Bristol Rovers play at Eastville, and his mother could work out the score by looking at their faces as they turned into Macaulay Road on their way home.

When war broke out, Lionel was working at the BAC in Filton, and although this was a reserved occupation, he enlisted in the RAF as soon as he was old enough, seeing action in Palestine, Egypt, Tripolitania and Italy.

Like many veterans, Dad didn’t talk much about his war service. He mentioned getting the  bumps in the Western Desert on his 21st birthday, and how hard it was to play football on sand dunes, but kept most of what he went through to himself. The friendships he forged during this time were renewed decades later in the 1990s, when my parents attended RAF reunions in Stratford-upon-Avon, and these gave Dad the chance to talk with people who had been there with him, the men he called his brothers, and he valued this.

Once demobbed in 1946, Lionel embarked upon a series of jobs, which included office work at Maggs department store, a spell as a Co-op insurance man, and a return to the world of aviation, working as a section leader at Rolls-Royce, responsible for ordering and despatching engine parts for Concorde.

During his free time, Dad continued to play football, as well as cricket, tennis and badminton, mainly at Eden Grove; and it was here, in 1949, that he met a sporty young woman, six years his junior, from a large family in Bishopston. My godmother, Betty Daveridge, remarked how she knew something was going on between my father and her best friend, Sylvia Hill, because as he drove their group of friends home at the end of get-togethers, he started dropping my mother off last, even though this made his route rather more scenic than necessary. My mother adds that once they became engaged, Dad sold his car. I suppose it had served its purpose, and anyhow, he had to pay for the ring.

Dad was still a huge football fan. In 1946 he’d gone AWOL from RAF St Athan to watch a derby match between Rovers and City, incurring a fortnight’s ‘jankers’ when his absence was discovered. (Sadly for Dad, the match was a nil-nil draw.) And Mum recalls that upon his return from the 1953 FA Cup Final at Wembley, he woke her at 3am to describe Stanley Matthews’ legendary cross from the right wing that resulted in the winning goal, and couldn’t understand why she wasn’t as enthusiastic about it as he was.

But of course, Mum was into rugby really, and after meeting her three older brothers who all played, Dad decided it might be wise to show an interest in their sport too. Thus began his allegiance to Bristol Rugby Club. Both Mum and Dad held season tickets until Dad was well into his 90s, and after they’d called it a day, he’d listen avidly to radio coverage of each fixture, and enjoyed trips to Ken and Hilary’s apartment to watch televised matches on Sky.

Dad also loved singing. He was a founder member of Filton Glee Club, which later became Filton Male Voice Choir, and an enthusiastic participant in the many exchange visits with the men's choir in Witzenhausen, Filton's twin town. During his final years he sang with the Filtones, last attending choir practice, here in this church, the Wednesday before his death.

Germany aside, Dad didn’t do much long distance travelling after he left the RAF, though he was often to be found with his nose in an atlas. His skill with the compass, and innate sense of direction, stood him in good stead for when he and Mum did their coast-to-coast walk, from St Bees Head to Robin Hood’s Bay, with their friends, Charles and Kathleen, whom they’d met years earlier on the beach at Shaldon in South Devon.

Dad had first discovered Shaldon, with my mother and elder sister Linda, in 1960. He would describe how he’d walked onto the beach, looked across the river Teign, and felt a strong sense of coming home. This was confirmed 35 years later when a chance sighting of some family history revealed that Dad’s great-great-grandfather, a boatman from Weston, had lived and worked in Teignmouth during the 1830s, marrying a woman from St Marychurch during his stay.

Both Linda and I recall how we were marshalled onto the beach every morning on holiday, and there we would stay until dusk, whatever the weather. That is, apart from the obligatory trip to Dartmoor – always the same route, Haytor, to Widecombe, to Dartmeet, with a detour to Princetown, before heading for Postbridge, where Dad would stand on the clapper bridge and look up the East Dart in contemplation.

‘He could be an irascible old bugger, though, couldn’t he?’ said his great friend Georges, just after his death, and yes, Dad wasn’t always easy to be around. He was a stickler for right and wrong as he saw it, refusing, for instance, to accept any corporate hospitality or even claim his expenses when he was a parish, and later district councillor, and he expected all those around him to adopt the same high standards.

Yet he wasn’t above a bit of vandalism. He could never walk past a patch of wet concrete without inscribing his and his companions’ initials in it. Linda reports that the letters LH and DH from a walk my father and I took along the sea wall at Holcombe in 1987 have survived all intervening storms, at least until her most recent inspection last summer. And whilst the Beatles were all ‘scruffy individuals’, Dad himself kept his hair long on top, earning himself the nickname ‘Curly’ and many return trips to the RAF barber on the orders of his sergeant major.  

Curly was also the name his seven grandchildren knew him by, as his magnificent black and white mane gradually turned silver before thinning away altogether. He enjoyed their visits, and was latterly a devoted dog-sitter while I was at work.

Dad was well looked after by Mum for 66 years, from the day of their wedding in 1951 to his death. We are thankful he was spared a long decline and that when it came, his dying was quick and apparently painless. My enduring late memory will be of him sitting up in bed as the on-call nurse checked his temperature and blood pressure the Friday before he died. He felt horrible, he said, but nevertheless, there he was, taking his medals out of the tin he kept on the bedhead and telling her the details of each one, while she tried valiantly to sound his chest.

Occasionally Dad and I would talk about death, and I’d like to finish with a short poem by the great American poet Langston Hughes which gives beautiful shape to our conclusions:

Dear lovely Death

That taketh all things under wing—

Never to kill—

Only to change

Into some other thing

This suffering flesh,

To make it either more or less,

But not again the same—

Dear lovely Death,

Change is thy other name.

Salvaging an A.W.38 Whitley

It’s 1941. My father, Lionel Harvey, is 19, RAF ground crew and stationed in Scotland. One day a pilot on a training flight gets into trouble over the Dornoch Firth and manages, just, to land his Whitley on the highest part of a sandbank.  The tide comes in but doesn’t quite reach the plane. The race is on to salvage it.

The authorities set about finding billets for the men, including my father, who are charged with carrying out the operation.  None of the locals will agree to take them, so when they try again, they are accompanied by a police officer and my father finds himself assigned to Summerton Farm, near Tain, then in the ownership of Jock and Annie Moore. He is accompanied by two other airmen, one from Newcastle, the other from Ayrshire. The polite demeanour of the airmen soon dispels suspicion and a rapport is established – although when, at one point, the young Scot describes himself as a highlander, Annie Moore draws my father, a Bristolian, to one side and hisses ‘He’s nae a Hielander!’

It is my father’s job to get the two engines out of the Whitley, and this is done using pulleys.  The whole of the plane is then dismantled, and a raft is built out of about sixty strong, iron-bound barrels to transport the pieces of plane over the water to dry land.  It's arduous work, as the sand is deep and unstable, and it’s tiring just reaching the plane. (My father is yet to become an expert at playing football in the Sahara.)  Rowing the raft is no easier, not least because the oars they have been given are of unequal length – one about six foot, the other closer to ten.  It’s really hard to row the raft and negotiate the currents and get it going in the right direction.

The heaviest part of the plane is the fuselage, and to help shift this, about fifty Highlanders who are stationed nearby are drafted in to help.  In the space of three weeks they manage to get all of the plane back onto the shore without getting a single piece wet.

Footnote 1: RAF ground crew were instructed to stop wearing their wellington boots in their habitual style, with the tops turned down, as the local lads were doing the same and their mothers had complained to the authorities that they were breaking their boots and causing unnecessary expense. This instruction was not heeded.

Footnote 2: My father kept in touch with the Moores for many years, until they died. He went back to see them with my mother after they married in the early 50s, and my sister and her husband also tried to visit in 1981, but didn't manage to rouse a then very elderly Jock, who had fallen asleep in his armchair and didn’t hear them knocking on the door. 

Going Home : May 1945

It's towards the end of the war, just after VE day but before VJ day. My father is in Italy, stationed at Foggia on the Adriatic.  He's ground crew and they’ve been removing bomb racks from planes and putting in benches for the transportation of prisoners of war.  One of the pilots tells him and his mate that if he gets a chance to go back to Blighty, he’ll take them with him. At this point my father has been away for 3 years and 8 months and has been told he will be off to Karachi shortly. In the event, this doesn’t happen because of the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but for now he has no prospect of seeing home for months or even years.  When the pilot’s gone, his friend, who is equally desperate, says ‘I shouldn’t bank on it if I were you’.

 But a week later the pilot tells them he is about to fly a proof run and will take Dad and his mate back to England.  As the plane – a Liberator – starts taxiing down the runway, Dad climbs up into the cupola of the plane, which was for navigating by the stars.  They cross Italy to a base on the Tyrrhenian coast, and then the pilot flies over France and straight up the Champs-Élysées  and over L’Arc de Triomphe.  As they descend over Hampshire, my father thinks he has never seen anything as green as the English countryside.  They land at RAF Stoney Cross near Lyndhurst in the New Forest and as he disembarks, Dad kisses the ground.  He is 23 years old.  Then he and his mate start edging towards the gate.

‘Where are you going?’ asks the pilot.

‘Home, sir,’ says Dad.

‘Sorry, there’s no time for that,’ comes the response. ‘We have to be off at 8am tomorrow morning. But I will get you a pass to go off base.’

So they hitch to Bournemouth instead and have a meal in Bobby’s, the department store.  Everyone’s looking at them because they are in khaki summer uniform but with their RAF stripes – ‘an eagle flying backwards’.  They find a bed and breakfast and are back at base for 8am the next day.

As the plane starts to taxi, a lorry drives up. The pilot stops the plane and talks to the driver. There’s bad weather over France and they’ll have to delay their return by a day.

This time there’s no stopping Dad.  He hitches as far as Bath – it’s easy to get lifts because he’s in uniform.  Then he catches a train to Temple Meads and gets a bus up the Gloucester Road to Horfield.  As he walks up Macauley Road, the woman who lives opposite calls out ‘Oh, hello, Lionel! When are you going back?’

In the garden his father, a veteran of the Somme, is budding roses.  He looks up at my father without a flicker of emotion.  ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘I’d better go in and tell your mother.’

His mother is, of course, thrilled, over-joyed, overcome at seeing her boy after so long away and so much danger.  They stay up talking till midnight, and Dad is up and off at 6am the next morning to get back to Lyndhurst by 8.  But whilst on the train, he discovers that it won’t take him all the way to the base so he has to hitch the last few miles. Time is tight and as he hurries around the perimeter of the airfield, he sees the plane getting ready to take off.  He asks a passing lorry driver to take him over to it, which he does, and he gets on in the nick of time.

A day or two later he apologises to the pilot for being so late and nearly missing the plane.

‘That’s quite all right,’ says the pilot. 

A Poem for Remembrance Day 2012

Tobruk

for LRH

Silence,

not for two minutes

but sixty years.

Only then does he start to talk, 

not to his family but his brothers,

those soldiers in slippers,

with cemetery teeth,

their medals saucepan lids

pinned to punctured chests,

their stories shrapnel

lodged in matter

from a distant land called War.

Later, I gather rusted splinters,

their gist a desert expedition:

mirage of wire,

signs in barbed Gothic script,

hot metal surfacing

through oceanic sand, in front, behind. I panic,

turn to trace his steps,

a trail of breadcrumbs

swallowed up by circling dunes;

not knowing how this terror ends,

if my father will survive

to speak its name.

                       © Deborah Harvey 2011

My father was ground crew in the RAF during the second world war and saw service in Palestine, Egypt, Tripolitania and Italy.

This poem is from my collection, Communion, published by Indigo Dreams.  If you like, you can read some more here.