Thailand, the Comfort of Strangers and Friends
The lovely, warm and smiley anesthesiologist talked calmly and put the mask over my face asking me to breathe deeply. I dreamed but woke to a circle of concerned faces looking down on me calling my name. ‘Dawid, Dawid, are you alright?’ I couldn’t breathe, try as I might, my lungs didn’t work, when I tried to suck in air, nothing happened.
American Football, the LA Experience
It's been a lot of years but the memories are still vivid although they are abstract sounds and colours of flashing tangents and collisions at high speed. I did not enter football as an ex-rugby player but as an ex-soldier and athlete. I began helping with the...
Soldier X | Part 10, Walking Tall
Walking Tall It is hard now to remember what life was like back then I believed them when they told me I was alone in the world and that this place and time were invincible. They left us to walk those troubled streets as strangers But the...
Soldier X | Part 9, Berlin
Berlin He adjusts his jacket, sits and adjusts his trouser legs, tics, opens his book, pause. Stillness for a few moments. Speaks After the war, I was in Berlin and an extra duty we had was train guard. This meant going to Magdeburg in the Russian...
Soldier X | Part 8, Belfast
Belfast I was sitting there watching Smithy smoke a joint as he lay on his pit. I got the dope from a girl back home. She sent me dope and my father sent me the local newspaper. ‘Leisure centre hosts flower arranging debacle’ that kind of thing. We even...
Soldier X | Part 7, Germany 1945
Germany 1945 He is in an armchair and takes off his reading glasses, tics, lays his book in his lap; Bronowski’s, ‘The Ascent of Man’, and tells me about Germany 1945. There sit I, his luckless double, and listen again to the silence between his nonchalance. I...
Soldier X | Part Six, Normandy
Normandy This is where I began; after my father died. It’s a beautiful part of France and the beaches that stretch along the coastline as you pass through the towns of Ouistreham, Luc-sur-Mer, Lyon-sur-Mer, Arromanches, Colleville, Veirville and Le Madeleine are clean...
Soldier X | Part Five, Meat Wagons & Memorials
Meat Wagons & Memorials Because we were involved in covert soldiering in Northern Ireland we were transported from Aldergrove Airport, Belfast to the Special Forces Training centre, Ballykinla, a journey of several hours, in an articulated lorry normally...
Soldier X | Part Four, Cadiz
Cadiz Auntie Elsie married Uncle Charlie; they had a son Arthur and a daughter Monica. Arthur was about my age. Charlie was a lovely man and a solicitor so they were “posh” and lived in Wandsworth by Wimbledon common. He had been a prisoner of war during the...
Soldier X | Part Three, Munich
Munich There were dances almost every night in village halls, church halls, the Palais. Another pal was a bit like your Uncle Ken; quiet and nervous. He was keen on building himself up and was doing a Charles Atlas Body Building course. The rest used to...
Soldier X | Part Two, London
London I went into a public-house to get a pint o' beer, The publican 'e up an' says, "We serve no red-coats here." The girls behind the bar they laughed an' giggled fit to die, I out’s into the street again an' to myself says I: O its...
Soldier X | Part One, Home
Home I am Soldier X. I am the backbone, the spine upon which the flabby meat of civilisation hangs. There absolutely is evil in the world and soldiers stand at the border where civilisation meets savagery Because I do this, you don't have...