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A little story. A couple of years ago I did a thread on how much history we have knocking about in drawers, personal objects that link us via people, or family to events or stories. I have my dad’s service fork, it was used for doling out pet food for years...
Then it vanished into a drawer for 20 years, and When my mum died I found it again; a rather knackered bent fork with 521005 embossed into it the handle. It reminded me at the time of a story about another family object, one that had vanished. One that had a significance...
Based on something my mum once said about it in passing when I was a kid, it was so inconsequential at the time that it barely registered as having meaning. Then last January my eldest brother died (bear with me, people stop dying now) and as is the way, his effects were sifted.
Today, just over a year later. This arrived from Canada. My niece found it in a drawer. She also knows the story, because stories spread from and coalesce around certain people, and she and I are quite alike. It is an Ever Ready Razor, a 1914 pattern with a 1924 patent.
It’s belonged to my dad. It sat us used in the bathroom on a shelf for my entire childhood. He had a more modern razor, single bladed still, and stainless steel, but it took modern blades, he used that. So why did this sit there...
He was in the RAF, I’ve droned on about this before. He joined in 1933, and by the outbreak of the war had gone up a rank it two, and him and my mum had a baby on the way. My eldest brother.
In 1940, he was sent to France. He packed up and had to leave his heavily pregnant wife behind. I have letters from him to her that sketch the pain of this, filigreed with a bit of fear. This was at the time that Operation Aerial was already swinging into action.
So they got off a boat, onto a train, then got off the train and were told to get out of France immediately, and you’re on your own lads, each NCO take five men and away you go.
They walked for days, tried to hitch, had no food and one pistol between them. Eventually they managed to get on another train, which was bombed. Dad lost a man and was blown into a pond.
They made it to Brest, Dunkirk and the northern Ports had gone, this was a new operation, Operation Dynamo was over, Aerial was happening. My mum insisted he was on one of the last boats out in the fragments of stuff she told me.
It wasn’t a particularly big boat, but enough for a fair number of men. The razor is small and the handle unscrews so it packs flat. He got it out, he was always a bit dapper, not a scruffy Herbert like me and my brothers. Anyway he had a shave on the boat.
And this is where the comment from my mum comes in ‘oh that old thing, every man on the boat back from France shaved with that, he was the only man who still had a razor’. So there it is.
An object, a man, and a story.
Here he is in Leyton in early 1940 with my mum, ‘avin a fag.
Here he is in Leyton in early 1940 with my mum, ‘avin a fag.
There’s a bit more here on him and it and what I thought I knew. I’d still love to find out which ship or boat it was. https://www.invisibleworks.co.uk/dear-dad/
