I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandad recently. He died almost 60 years ago when I was about seven (I think).

He’d been a miner and had been blacked by the coalowners from the pits of Nottinghamshire for striking.  My grandmother, with six kids to feed, threw him out and told him not to come back until he had found work.  So he walked to Doncaster (around 40 miles away) and got a job at Bentley Colliery.

But I digress.

What’s prompted this memory worm is that I’ve been reading “Birdsong” by Sebastian Faulks, a complex and compelling novel set predominantly during the First World War.  His description of life and death in the trenches is best summed up by a phrase he uses of a “mechanized abattoir” reminding us, as he says, that we live in times lacking that intensity.  My grandad fought in that war and I regret not having had the opportunity to talk to him about it, if, indeed, he would have done so.

He did leave me with a couple of stories which might or might not have happened.

I recall he had a scar at his elbow which he told me was a bullet wound. I’ve no reason to doubt this – other than for the second story.

When I hadn't had the courage to stick up for myself at school he told me about a time he was in his trench when six Germans jumped with a seventh about to. He faced them with his bayonet and told the 6^th, “Budge up and make some room for your mate”.

I might be doing him a posthumous disservice but could this have been “grandad talk”?