BURMA STAR

It's strange where your leaps of thought can take you.

The other week I was watching the "Top Gear" Burma special and, because parts of the programme were irritating me quite intensely, my thoughts began to drift and, after checking my messages on the evil but handy internet monitoring device, I was looking around for something else to concentrate on other than the TV blathering away in the corner, when my memories took me to the photo albums my dad created in the months just before he died, way back in 1985 when I was still a student.

This was, of course, inevitably all connected to the zeitgeist of what I'd been (sort of) watching, because, as we all know, everything is interconnected, and you can't set out on a journey through your thoughts without a trigger of some sort.

You see, in the latter part of the second world war, my dad was stationed in Burma and had a number of snapshots that he'd taken at the time and, as I was watching that show, for the first time in years, I began to wonder quite in which part of Burma he'd actually been in and whether he'd seen any of the spectacular sights that those three idiots in the lorries were enthusing about.

Probably not, I reasoned. After all, there was a war on. Stopping to look at the scenery was probably neither the brightest thing to do, nor likely to be at the top of anyone's list of priorities if they were trying to avoid getting shot at. Anyway, if truth is one of the first casualties of war, then the landscape and scenery must be at least in the top ten.

Anyway, the point is that I know that my dad had spent some time in Burma during the war, but I didn't really know quite where he'd been based. They probably weren't generally actually being shot at a lot, I imagine, because they were a medical unit, but I don't suppose that was any guarantee.

I knew that after ending up as a trained Medical Orderly, having failed at being useful in several other areas of army life, and having spent at least one night being convinced that he was an Oxo Cube (long story), he'd ended up in the jungle and had once had tales to tell long into the night when we had met a chap with a similar background when we had been on holiday when I was a youngster. There were also rumours that once reached me that some of the sights he'd seen and things he'd had to do in that Forward Treatment Unit couldn't have been all that pleasant for a twenty year-old lad from the Welsh Valleys, although we never really got the chance to ever sit down and chat about these things ourselves.

By the time I'd got to an age to understand such things, and out of the age of total self-absorption, and might have finally taken an interest, he'd already gone.

Interestingly enough, I remember him getting quite stroppy during that last summer of his life - the summer, incidentally, when I celebrated my twenty-first birthday - because of all of the V.E. Day celebrations which were going on. His circle of friends would chunner away in irritation that they had spent several more months still battling away in what seemed to them like it was a forgotten war out there in the jungle whilst Europe seemed to be of the belief that the fighting was all over.

Well, I say battling. By that stage of the war, as I mentioned, my dad was working as a Medical Orderly, and was unlikely to pick up that many weapons, but I'm sure that they got to fight a few battles of their own, too, even if they were only psychological.

Mind you, like many of his generation, he rarely talked about it. well, not unless he happened across (like during that long evening in Yugoslavia), another member of the "Burma Star Association" to chat with. This meant that I never got to know much about what went on there. There are just these few pages of photographs, with the notes and the names and the places scribbled underneath them, and a few snatched memories of conversations had with other people before I got sent off to bed.

Oh and the scrapbook, of course. More photographs and correspondence and documents from that part of his life which I may need to explore further some other time, whenever the mood, or the TV, sends me back into that dusty corner of the room.

Flicking through the pages of that dreadfully destructive self-adhesive photograph album, I can't help but notice that because of the war, my father had been to some interesting and unusual places which he might otherwise never have seen. There are pictures from India and Cairo, for example (some of which I might post here some other time), as well as, to someone with such strong religious beliefs as he had, the "Promised Land", all of which must have seemed strange and exotic to this young kid from South Wales who'd spent a lot of his youth in hospital and probably hadn't ventured much further than Cardiff before.

In fact, it's hard for me to picture my dad in these exciting faraway places, even though I do have the pictures to prove it, but it really wasn't half bad for some kid from the valleys...

It would be remiss of me not to comment upon that smutty use of the word "BURMA" when written on the back of letters home during those frustrating war years. I believe that it was supposed to mean "Be Undressed Ready My Angel" although I don't suppose that this would have been the intention when this God-fearing son of Wales was writing home to his Ma...