The Journey Begins

Thanks for joining me!

As with most families I have often wondered about the lives and times of my ancestors. In the age of the internet there are so many opportunities to find out more about them, what they did, the lives that they led and the historic times that they lived through. Looking back it just seems to me that my parents and grandparents lived through momentous events in history, the likes of which (thankfully) I have never had to experience. It is thanks to them that I and future generations have the freedom, the time and the ability to investigate the past in a way that was never afforded to them. This is my tribute to one of my ancestors and my own personal thank you to them all.

Grandad Alf

I guess the first clue that I ever got that my Grandfather Alfred Thompson was involved in the First World War was the fact that he was deaf, not just a bit deaf, not a selective deafness that so often inflicts males of the species but a total all enveloping deafness that was almost tangible. The most obvious manifestation of this was when he was driving. In the 60’s and 70’s cars were mechanical beasts, not the computerised purring automobiles of today, but mechanical goliaths that belched fire and brimstone. His deafness was most apparent when he started the car, there were no rev counters so the only way he could tell if the engine had actually started was when he heard it. Needless to say that for him to hear it the engine had to be at full throttle. Only when he could hear it and had woken up half the neighbourhood did he decided to set off. That level of accelerator control continued for the whole journey. We could be crawling along at 20 m.p.h but the engine would sound as if it was doing 80 in second gear. We could always tell when he was on his way home, you could hear the car coming form several streets away. I remember asking my Dad why he did this and Dad explained to me that he had lost his hearing during the first war, the sound of the artillery guns and the constant shelling had permanently damaged his ability to hear. At that time I did not ask anything more. However like most people I now wish that I had. I am not sure that Alf would have said much about his experiences, his generation did not share their nightmares so easily.

As the years went by I did pick up one or two other bits of information that stuck in my mind. I remember the name ‘Hellfire Corner’. This was a road junction in Ypres, Belgium along which the troops would journey on their way to the frontline. Also I heard that he was a stretcher bearer in the Royal Army Medical Corps, although at a young age I did not realise the true horrors that he must have gone through.

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton