Writer-insighter

A day for plastic patriots yesterday, the day that many, possibly most people now don’t know, with people who wrap themselves in the flag and bang on about the war first and foremost. In 1945, yesterday was the last day of the Second World War. It was supposed to be May 7th, not May 8th, but Stalin wasn’t up for sharing a peace deal with anyone else, so far as I understand it.

It was, according to an US fighter pilot I used to know, the first day of massive drinking that lasted weeks, and an immediate two weeks of leave granted to pilots as suddenly the US Army Airforce didn’t have much use for their services, at least in Europe. A lot of the drinking, he said, was because the war was over so they wouldn’t get killed. A lot more of the drinking, he said, was because they thought they’d all be sent to the Pacific to fly ground-attack for the invasion of Japan, so they’d all get killed anyway. Meanwhile, there was drinking to be done.

The date probably accounts for an Instagram post I saw today, bizarrely put up by an account called IamSophieScholl, by someone who is demonstrably and easily proved not to be Sophie Scholl, given that she was beheaded in 1943. I thought maybe it was her anniversary too, but no, she died in February. Her name is next to unknown in Britain, chiefly, I think, because it interferes with the accepted narrative.

They all knew what was going on

My step-brother in law came out with this idiotic statement years ago. It’s stuck in my mind ever since. I asked him if he saw his neighbours being beaten up by the police, the street full of marked police vans, people in police uniforms kicking the door down next door, dragging the neighbours into the street then putting them in a marked police van, never to be seen again, what he would have done. Called the police?

But it became a handy trope to justify the behaviour of the Allies, and handier still to justify the deliberate destruction of every German town of any size. I used to know, as it were, a woman who was born long after 1945 in a place called Hildesheim.

Before.

You almost certainly won’t have heard of it. There was never anything much there. A grass airfield that Luftwaffe squadron KG200 used a couple of times, flying a captured American B17 bomber to drop Nazi agents into parts of Germany over-run by the Allies. A factory that made optical lenses. Not in any sense an important military target. Not even strategically important, on the plain southwest of Hanover. It didn’t matter.

There were seven previous occasions when Hildesheim had been bombed, but March 22nd 1945 was the big one. The Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command issued an order which was very specific: “to destroy built up area with associated industries and railway facilities.” You might want to re-read that carefully, as it’s the exact text.

“Destroy built up area.”

And associated industries. Not the other way around. What it specifically doesn’t say is the fantasy propagated by countless films, TV series, books and Brexiters – we were noble, mate, we didn’t bomb civilians deliberately. It was unfortunate they were there. But that’s war. Where also the first casualty is truth.

The orders for Hildesheim show that to be the total and utter lie it always was. German houses and German civilians were going to be bombed because …well, because they could be bombed. We don’t want all these bombs going to waste, do we? They didn’t build themselves, you know. What do you suggest we do otherwise, chuck them in the sea off Ireland or something?

Almost three-quarters of the houses in Hidlesheim were destroyed overnight, by 250 British airplanes. Fifteen hundred German people were killed. Five hundred of them have never been identified. They couldn’t be.

But today, seventy-six years ago, it had stopped. In theory, anyway. A couple of German units hadn’t heard of the surrender, stuck on the shores of the Baltic. A couple of U-boats had heard and were heading for South America.

But for most people in Europe, it was over. If there was no other benefit of the entire EU project, keeping it being over alone would be enough to justify any amount of contributions. But we forget, just the way we were told to. Just the way we pretend not to.

I got an offer today, one of those Groupon-type deals of a hotel for a silly cheap price. This was three or four nights, at about £130, which is a pretty good rate, despite it being what the hotel called a ‘self-drive’ price.

I know this hotel. What they mean is you can sail there, or take your submarine there, as people used to do back in the war, when they torpedoed the jetty for fun, training, or take your longship there, which the Vikings did, then when they realised there wasn’t much going on in this little burgh, they portaged the whole thing into Loch Lomond, the next big bit of water, to see if there were better pickings there.

Or you can drive, but there isn’t any other way of getting there. It’s the middle of nowhere in the middle of Scotland.

Like any good hotel, this one is supposed to be haunted. Maybe it is. We’d been on tour, tour-guiding a group of American seniors. This was one of those tours when you just wish you hadn’t accepted the offer to do it, full of people who keep talking about how you Europeans took your life in your hands when you go to the supermarket without a gun.

There were a few who were ok. One tall-is woman with a nice pair of jeans, but mostly an older crowd. It had been a long day. The coach had managed to be in two minor collisions within a half hour that afternoon. Neither of them the coach driver’s fault, but it still happened and he still needed a new wing mirror after a hire van had come round a corner on our side of the road. It shook him. It shook me.

We got to the hotel and after everyone had checked in, after the mass panic when 50 Americans realised there was only one lift and they’d have to – OMIGARD – walk upstairs or wait, I thought I could do with a walk before dinner. There weren’t many places to walk, just up to the end of the sea loch where there was a little park we’d passed on the way in, through the main – the only – street of the tiny loch-head village, past the crumbling wooden pier slowly crumbling into the water. It didn’t matter, it was the only place to go.

After the main street had ended there was a little bit of open country before the park. That’s when I noticed the tallish woman and her nice jeans walking in front of me, about 50 yards ahead but walking more slowly than me.

And I realise the thing I could sense she was realising too – it’s getting towards dusk, we’re the only two people around, I’m gaining on her and this park we’re headed to is a dead end.

What do you say?

I’m not going to hurt you

Somehow it doesn’t sound that reassuring, does it? “You don’t need to scream,” doesn’t help, either. I did what any red-blooded male would do – walk determinedly past her, heading straight for the bottle bank and keep on going, into a damp pasture that lead down to the shore of the loch and stumble on the seaweed back to the hotel that way. Which took about an hour and two falls, which was a total and utter pain but better than having the poor woman think I was stalking her with intent.

The hotel was supposed to be haunted by a Green Lady and a banshee, but only one person had ever seen the Green Lady, a cleaner in about 1971. I asked the manager about it but he asked me not to talk about it. He said he’d never heard about it but things like that scared him, so if I wouldn’t mind, stop.

Dinner passed off without too much of a hitch. I arranged a birthday cake for a girl whose birthday it was at her mother’s prompting, the same mother who reacted as if I’d spat on her plate when I got a cake together from the hotel. So glad I bothered. Early night. Nothing much else to do except sit up drinking with the driver on some tours, and I didn’t want to do that on this one.

I woke from a dream of a woman screaming at about five. At least I thought it was a dream. I got up and opened the door of my room. Nothing. No screams, no running feet, no swinging doors, no sign that it was anything at all except a dream. Back to sleep for a couple of hours, then breakfast, we bid good-bye to the hotel with only one complaint about there being only one towel per guest “So you know what to dry last” and off we go, along the road past the bottle bank in the little park at the head of the loch, past the information plaque I’d had to study for about twenty minutes to allow nice jeans woman to get out of the park without thinking I was following her. Another place they’ll never see again.

We got to a huge cafe in the Lake District some hours later. There was a seat with a group of Philippino women on the tour. They were sat at a table all holding hands with their eyes shut. They looked upset. It turned out they were just saying grace before their coffee and cake but actually, since I asked, yes, they were upset.

The problem was they’d been woken by a woman’s scream at about five am. On the whole I don’t think I’m going to take-up that Groupon offer.

Seventy-six years ago tonight it was April 27th, 1945. A man I used to know was 20 then.

This is a very simple little story. Tonight in April 1945, a young American airman missed his last transport home from a dance and had to walk from Ipswich to where he was based, on an airfield at Leiston, which doesn’t exist any more, returned to the fields it was before 3,000 Americans came to live there.

So far as I can make out his journey was twenty-two miles, give or take a mile or two. But it’s difficult to be sure. The road he took isn’t certain. He couldn’t remember how he got out of Ipswich in the dead of night. There were no signposts; all the signposts had been taken down in 1940, to hinder the German invaders who never came. He had to walk because there was no traffic on the roads at that time of night, and precious little traffic anyway. All civilian car drivers had problems getting petrol and anyway, back then most people didn’t have a car. Even if they did, the airfield was deep inside a security zone, where travel was under curfew and no-one except locals were allowed to travel, for ten miles back from the coast. His memories of the exact route were quite faint when he told me about it. He couldn’t remember where one of his girlfriends had lived in Ipswich either, the one he said he should have married.

You can hear his story here:

I drive parts of this route most weeks, living here on the edge of England. A decade ago I drove the whole of the route with him, when he came over to visit for the annual Memorial Service at Leiston. He laid a wreath on the monument there in Harrow Lane, a place at the edge of a caravan park in a field commemorating the fact that in eighteen months eighty-two men took off from the airfield and never came back. All around the memorial are lush green fields. The few airfield buildings that remain are falling down. We walked around some of them looking at the few things that remained; some old graffiti about buying war bonds, and some more words written on the walls of a hut that turned out to be notes on when some piglets long turned to chops and bacon were born, back in 1960 something. All day it rained on and off, much as Joe said it used to pretty much all the time he was there, from late January until after VE day, 9^th May, Victory in Europe day, when Germany was defeated. Everyone got drunk for two weeks. They were given extended unofficial leave because although the war wasn’t over and the Japanese were still undefeated, Japan was a long way away and getting the whole army and air-force machinery around the world to fight Hirohito’s forces would take weeks, so long before jet flight and charter holidays. As it turned out, his squadron were sent to Germany when everyone had sobered up, the airforce of occupation in a country where every town of any size had been bombed.

But that’s rushing to the end of this story, which is really about the road. It’s hard to tell how the journey was made, because obviously it all happened a long time ago and even here in East Anglia things change. I originally planned to walk the same road and see how much it’s changed for myself. From the start, I knew it had changed a lot. It was going to take a lot of detective work to find-out where the road was different and when and how it got that way. It was going to be a combination of his memory of a place that once was, looking at maps to see how the roads have changed over the last 70 years and a bit of guesswork. I hoped that I’d have to use as little guesswork as possible. 

I like finding things out, and I like knowing what went before. The first time I knew about the airfield was when I moved into Yoxford, which is a village of about 700 people four miles from Leiston and its airfield and about twenty miles up the east coast, north of Ipswich. 

There are no motorways in Suffolk. It’s a county of holidaymakers and retired people. It has beautiful days in summer when time seems to stand absolutely still. And it is bitterly cold in winter, when the wind rushes straight in from Russia, blowing clear across Holland and the North Sea without a single hill in the way for 1500 miles and more. I didn’t know anything about the village apart from the fact that it was ten miles from Southwold and the property prices were about half what they were in the ultimate 1950s timewarp seaside resort. The obvious thing to do was search the Internet, and the first and pretty much the only thing I found when I typed “Yoxford” into Google was a website dedicated to the Yoxford Boys. It sounded like a boxing club, but when I clicked on it the reality was a little different. One of the pilots who had flown from Leiston, a man called Bud Anderson, was not only still alive but had built a website dedicated to everyone who served there, on Station 373, the home of the United States Army Air Force 357^th Fighter Group, who Lord Haw Haw, William Joyce, called “The Yoxford Boys” in a radio broadcast.

Along with so much of this story, so much has changed, so much has been forgotten and to make sense of the story I needed to unpick the layers of forgotten things, And I think this story, and all the other stories like this, need to be told. Because this is not a blood and guts tale of how a brave pilot won the war, the kind of thing Hollywood used to make films about. This is one story among literally millions of others about how a very young man did something lots of ordinary young men did, missed his lift, in extraordinary circumstances. And these were. Apart from the fact there was a war on, after Elmer had walked his 26 mile trudge through the spring lanes of Suffolk he had less than half an hour to get ready to fly one of the last combat missions of the war, eight hours of long range patrol and bomber escort into Germany. 

Like almost everything else I knew, or thought I knew about what my generation and certainly my father’s and grandfather’s generation always called The War, with capital letters. World War Two was the always the only war for them. Everything else that came after, all the scrubby little bushfights and fiascos like Korea, Cyprus, Aden, Northern Ireland, even Vietnam, all of these were never talked about in the same way. Not even the Cuban missile crisis, probably the closest any of us ever came to total and absolute nuclear destruction was never talked about the same way as The War. That was always in capitals.

I think it was probably because that war, World War Two as they only called it in the Airfix catalogue or the Radio Times, the Second World War, The War affected everybody, whether or not they were in uniform, and all the others really only affected the people who lived near whatever was happening, along with the people sent there to sort it all out. Or not, in most of those cases. Perhaps it was also called The War because it was the last time there was clearly, unarguably, a good side and a bad side and the good side won. Except of course calling any side absolutely good is a bit moot when both sides had the Soviet Union nominally on their side, and many of the people who fought the Nazis with us were sent back by us to the USSR and killed by the Soviets. Who raped tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of German women. The Soviet Union that Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister who Alf Garnett, Margaret Thatcher, Brexiters and thousands of others would not hear a word against knew all about in advance and let it happen. 

I remember an English teacher at my primary school who jumped into a conversation about the interminable war games we played at break. Practically every boy, even some of the girls, was on the British and American or the German side. I never minded being on the German side. Even now I don’t know why. It certainly wasn’t a political thing. Nobody told us about death camps, or pretty much anything else. Politics meant Harold Wilson on TV telling us one week that devaluing the pound would not affect the pound in our pockets and the next week reappearing to tell us that actually, thinking about it, it would, sorry about that, easy mistake to make, you know how it is when you’re busy. Goebbels and Goring and Hitler didn’t have television to broadcast on. Maybe it wouldn’t have been any different if they did. But there were differences, just under the surface.

The English teacher pounced on something somebody said, about how the Americans were on our side. She said they weren’t. That they were on their own side. I remember it still, the first time I ever heard a single voice even vaguely different to the official line. 

When you start peeling away it all gets a lot less clean and bright than it looks from a distance, or certainly from the distance that black and white war films gave me all through the 1960s, when I was a child. I grew up with the descendents of Polish exiles at school, in a society which had integrated them so effectively that no-one ever thought it was odd that in our little Wiltshire town there were kids called Chris Koslowski and Bozenka Kalinka. Just recently a friend from school remembered reciting the neams of all the Polish kids she remembered; together with another friend she got to around fifty names in one year of school roll of about a thousand. In the same way no-one thought it was odd that there was a little hut with a black coirrugated iron roof calling itself the Polish Deli on the road I walked to school along every morning. I went in there once when I was about fourteen.

I’d seen a deli in an American film and heard Don Maclean singing about American Pies. Thinking about it, that could have been a levee he was singing about, but in the same way and for the same reason, The War and its aftermath, or at least the interminable film autopsies every weekend afternoon that left English servicemen either disgusted or amused at the Americans winning it all on their own, as usual, as they said. But I put deli and levee and America and Fifth Avenue and Marilyn Monroe all together in my head to come up with something completely unlike the shabby shed full of old ladies wearing black buying sausages that I found when I opened the door. And blushed and stammered and wondered how I could go out again without anyone noticing, or how I could answer anyone who wanted to know what I wanted, who would only speak in Polish to me. 

I knew what I wanted but I didn’t know how to say it. I wanted to know what was going on. I wanted to be in a deli. But more than that I wanted to be more American, which wasn’t at all easy in Wiltshire in the early 1970s. Around the same time I saw one of the original American Beatniks being interviewed on our local TV station. He had been trying to jump a train and ride the rails at Temple Meads in Bristol, Brunel’s huge station on the Great Western Railway. The Beatnik sounded as confused as I was. Instead of being beaten-up by the railroad guards as he expected, they told him to mind out because the goods yard could be a dangerous place. They probably gave him a cup of tea. I felt like him all the time.

America was everywhere but it was almost impossible to find-out where. At school we played war games because it was the time war films were being made, as our fathers settled into middle age and remembered or pretended to remember a time when they didn’t live on a housing estate so new the pavements were made of gravel. We watched war films every weekend on TV. The films in colour were American. The black and white ones were usually British. The airplanes were a different shape and where the American GIs in the promotional TV shows like Combat, where a platoon fought its way across a generation’s memories of Normandy, where the German tanks were usually American 1950s models painted grey, where the Americans had semi-automatic Garand rifles even aged six or so you could see the difference as the plucky Brits soldiered on with Lee-Enfields left over from the war before, the kind illustrated in cut-away drawings in the red-bound Encyclopaedia Brittanica my father bought.

Years later I found a photo in a newspaper that seemed to sum things up. A tractor at harvest time and two men under what could only be an English sky at harvest time, their tractor looking like something Constable could have easily imagined, towing some arcane reaping machine or a binder or something else to do with harvest and corn and weird flailing mechanical arms, the kind of machine that Brunel would have laughed at before he puffed on his cigar and reached for his pencil and notebook. British mechanised farming in the early 1940s; you could tell because the colours were a bit wrong in the photo. The other clue was the men were harvesting right up to the edge of the field, long before set-aside strips had been thought off, right up to and under the steel silver wing of the B17, the Flying Fortress bomber parked at its dispersal bay on what had been farmland until the middle of 1943. When the Americans came. 

Here in Suffolk it’s still impossible to drive more than ten miles without coming across another collection of narrow lanes of crumbling concrete set-out in an A-shape, the runways that are still left, the concrete scars that gave George Orwell the idea to call England Airstrip One when he wrote 1984.

So this is one story. I don’t know yet whether it’s the story I want to tell. Maybe that’s what this story is about, keeping things from ending, keeping the stories after the people in the tale have gone. And like many people of my generation, I like these stories, I know how they end.

Back in January last year I walked the first half of Joe’s walk, from Ipswich railway station to Woodbridge. I’ve never managed to finish it, partly because the road has been re-routed and it doesn’t have a footpath alongside it any more, partly because I keep thinking it should be done at night to see exactly when daylight came so he could see where he was. Partly because there will be nothing there when I get to the end of the walk, no airfield, no huts, no engines starting, just the wind in the trees and the sightless windows of the few huts that at left that haven’t fallen down. Some of them you just don’t go near.

I live on another airfield, a B17 station. The first day I slept there I was woken by the sound of an engine I’ve never heard before or since. It went on for over ten minutes at six in the morning. I have absolutely no explanation for it. A quarter mile away there’s still building that was a generator house, a square brick building I’ve always wanted to convert into a house. Close by it is a long hut that used to the the gym and the chapel. I can’t even go through the door. Something stops me.

I try not to write about Brexit, simply because it’s the most stupid, depressing, self-destructive and utterly dishonest thing that has happened in politics in my lifetime. And also because I can’t write about it as well as this. And because writing about it doesn’t matter, unless you have a job writing lies about it, like say for example, the Prime Minister.

On a personal level I can’t get over a friend who not only voted for it, but necessarily voted therefore for the unarguable liar Johnson, a man who can’t even say publicly how many children he has. Her reason was as idiotic as the project itself. She was worried, she said, about ‘the rising power of Germany.’

After I’d checked that my leg wasn’t being pulled – it wasn’t – I bought her a calendar for Christmas. It was, admittedly, beautifully done, showing a print of a European city on each monthly page, as a reminder of places much more difficult to go and live in now. Another benefit of this particular calendar, I thought, was that it was this year’s date, rather than say, 1936 or somewhere nearer Herr Hitler’s accession.

But like the bad penny that always returns, Brexit isn’t going to go away. For nearly thirty years the thing that stopped me joining the Royal Marines had, namely the situation in Northern Ireland. Apart from the dubious efficacy of sending say, parachutists, or littoral warfare experts or the Horse Guards to troll around city streets not accepting cups of tea because they’d been used as lavatories very recently, I couldn’t accept the politics of it. Not Northern Ireland’s – I happily knew as little of that as the BBC was prepared to give me. It was the politics of soldiering that bothered me then and now to the extent that like prostitutes and housewives, regulars and mercenaries, I can’t see much difference in people doing the same job for money. I was notorious at school in Wiltshire for asking the only question when the Army came to recruit, which being less than ten miles from the Warminster School of Infantry was a handy go-to resource for any group of teachers who wanted a day off lessons once a year. The thing that bothered me was the loyalty thing. Not the ach mein Fuhrer, I vas only following orders bit, although it didn’t work at Nuremberg. I could understand that.

What I couldn’t follow was the sanctimonious ‘we just do what politicians tell us, it’s not our fault, we just get the job done’ schtick, which probably every soldier from Trajan’s legions to some grunt currently winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan has used. A politician tells you, for example, go to Northern Ireland. Ok, you do that. It’s Good. Orders. Another politician wins the election and says don’t go to Northern Ireland. Ok, you do that. Also Good. Orders.

Sorry and all that, but this isn’t the same as choosing macchiato or mocha. This is putting bullets in people, or stopping other people doing that, often by doing that. That, after all, is pretty much what armies are for. The self-deception of ‘I just do what I’m told AND it’s always right (and its accompanying “AND if you weren’t there you can’t judge” utter BS) is exactly what exercises Simon Wiesenthal to this day.

So I didn’t go. For a variety of personal reasons, from loving shooting and being quite a good instructor to an ex’s next door neighbour being the Commandant General with whom I’d shared gin and tonics on the lawn and then let down rather badly, I’ve always had mixed feelings about that. I didn’t go to Northern Ireland either, until three years ago. I absolutely hated the place.

I was nervous the whole time I was there. I was tour guiding, with a bunch of American kids. We arrived the day after the Apprentice Boys’ Parade. Oh, that was nice. Smoke from smouldering bonfires hung over Belfast, some still burning in the street near the central bus station.

“Gee, this is … this is just like Nazi Germany” one of them said. I told him there was no way Nazi Germany was this untidy. All I knew of Belfast was reading A Breed of Heroes while I was teaching kids to shoot and chasing cheerleaders in Wisconsin and from watching the nightly news throughout most of my life until the Good Friday agreement seemingly miraculously put a stop to “A bomb has gone off in Northern Ireland” headlines. But they weren’t even headlines. It happened so often it was like the weather; it was what happened there.

My step-sister walked past the car that exploded and killed a man in London. A friend had walked past Liberty’s window minutes before it blew out in another IRA bomb attack. Back in Warminster an army officer was shot when he opened his front door, but to be fair, it was never proved who did that and nobody in Northern Ireland claimed it. I remembered the Brighton bomb, obviously. I also remembered sitting in a lecture hall, hearing the bang and looking out of the window to see smoke rising from another bomb in London, as close as I ever want to get to the action, thanks all the same. That wasn’t really tension; none of us in those scenarios knew what was going to happen. Tension was what I felt in Belfast, with the streets full of smoke, people wandering around drunk who quite clearly hadn’t seen home in 24 hours and flashbacks to BBC News stories around more than a few street corners, with the paint still fresh on the UVF murals tastefully painted on the end walls of houses we saw.

Because I knew nothing very useful about the place apart from “I don’t want to be here, in a DPM smock or not” we collected a local guide and toured around the city with her. She was about my age. She’d lived in her farmhouse on the border all her adult life. Back when I was just about becoming an adult at journalist college I used to hitchhike, which was what people did back then. Not many, and not often, but some. More than now, certainly. If you’ve ever seen Radio On you’ll remember the mad flack-happy squady hitcher who gets dumped with good reason on the old A4. Yes, it’s very retro. So are petrol bombs in Northern Ireland, and they seem to be bringing them back. My own experience of meeting squadies on the road was the flip side of PTSD; I remember very clearly one describing how his foot patrol had taken fire from a farmhouse across the border one night. He told me about emptying magazines of 7.62 into the window the flashes were coming from; then when it had all stopped, totally illegally raiding the farmhouse in Eire to find only pools of blood, not the body they wanted to prove what happened.

We got chatting, the guide and I. Because of the Royal Marines thing although I’d never been there I knew a fair bit about the situation. The coach drove us to the Peace Wall, overlooked by the remaining bits of the infamous Divis Flats I remembered from countless news stories. The kids were supposed to write messages of peace and hope on the wall originally built to stop the locals fighting each other. Personally, I thought it was a pointless bit of empty posturing for American teenagers, especially as this bunch were from California, not Boston and half of them were Hispanic. But hey, I’m just the guide so local lady guide, do your stuff.

Which she did quite nicely. The kids grabbed their magic markers and piled off the coach to write their encouraging slogans and the local guide and I stayed chatting on the street, by the door of the bus. Well, you know. Maybe.

While we were talking though, both being of an age where we remembered a time when someone screaming “Hard targets” was always a possibility, we kept an eye on what was going on around us. What we both noticed was a black ex-London taxi that was driving very slowly. Urban legend had it that at one time the IRA used these as well as local cabbies used them, but as mobile command centres that nobody would notice, not to pick-up fares. The cab slowly drove the length of our coach then stopped about 50 yards in front of us. Ok, it’s there. Nobody got in, nobody got out.

A small motorbike drove up in the opposite direction, slowly, two-up. It drove past the taxi, almost got to the coach, turned around, drove up to the black cab and stopped. The pillion talked to the cab driver through the window. I knew the local guide had seen this; from her glance I knew she knew I had too. The little motorbike turned around again and drove slowly towards the bus, past us standing just in front of the coach near the door at the front, and drove out of our sight, towards the rear of the bus and the fifty-two teenage Californians. That’s when it happened.

Bang! Bang!

I don’t know about you but in a fairly odd life, I’ve been shot at a few times. I nearly stopped a .45 ACP bullet in the face when I was at a shooting competition. I was shot at while I was visiting a castle in the hills above Toulon with an American girl. I think from the sound of it that it was only an air rifle, but given we couldn’t see who was doing it and we were the only people there, we were definitely being shot at. The time I walked into the middle of an IDF ambush was the least amusing. Pointing guns at people is very bad manners. Shooting them is even worse.

The local lady guide and I did the only sensible thing. Neither of us yelled ‘Hard targets!’ But we didn’t exactly cover ourselves with glory. We dived for cover out of sight of the taxi and the bike, ****ing fast. Sorry about that kids, but hey, no sense in us all getting shot, huh?

It turned out when the guide and I got back up and pretended nothing had happened (not to each other, out of earshot of the kids we both agreed we thought exactly the same thing was happening and it was not a good thing) it was just the bike. Backfiring. Like a cartoon. Ooops…..

Still the day brightened up. One of the kids told me he’d written ‘Screw the Peace Process” on the Peace Wall, so I had to tell his teacher because I didn’t want the entire bus actually really being massacred when the little motorbike turned out not to be backfiring at all, which meant the whole crew of Californians getting a Big Serious Speech back at the hotel, after which it turned out the kid told me he had only said that to impress me (son, do you know how fast I dived for cover? No. And you’re not going to. Utter idiot.) So that was all fun.

And the best bit came later that day, after we’d dropped off the nice local lady guide, who I’ve never seen again to this day. We left Northern Ireland and drove not through a checkpoint, not through the hard border my lunatic friend has put across the road, but just drove south, under the empty British Army guard posts and their array of antennas now receiving no messages at all, into the green fields of the Republic, heading for Dublin.

Dublin, another friend agreed, wasn’t that different to a bigger version of Trowbridge, but the south-west, where we were headed next, that was, and is, something else again. Best of all, it wasn’t bloody Belfast.