Thread: Whenever I see Fascists I think of helping out in my neighbour’s garden in West Dublin.

He was in his late 70s & started telling me, a young boy, of the D-Day Landings.

Things that happened to you in your youth can be prompted in old age.

Bill (I’ve changed his name) was from a strict Presbyterian family in Belfast.

He joined up in WWII with his best mate from school. They did everything together.

Maybe it was the 78y old man & the 12y old me amiably planting vegetables together that reminded him.

Bill was a man of God, a proud Belfastman, a proud Dub & a proud Irishman who also saw himself as fighting for ‘King & Country’. He’d have been delighted with the Belfast Agreement with its insistence that you could be Irish, or British or both. He was all these things.

He said he’d been on board a warship.

He loved ships, he sailed ships & he built boats in his garden.

Every night, when we were young, his arc lamp would glow from the end of his garden as a vessel came into shape.

When I was a toddler I believed that his shed was connected by a wire to the heavens.

I was sure that the fierce flashes of welding light & spark showers, visible from my bedroom window, were powered from the light up there, in the moon, glowing over our village.

The ships, he said, waited out at sea & he & his mate scurried into a smaller craft so that they could land on the beach.

The noise was like hell he said. A man of God, he meant it. His voice was low as he recalled that time some 40y before.

The smaller boat set off for the French beach & their sergeant told them to run as fast as..F- [here he realised a child was listening], run fast, don’t look back & keep your head down.

They waited, water to their ankles, anxious.

The boat scraped the beach, the panel was dropped & his buddies & he were like one animal racing up that beach in a surge of adrenaline & fear.

He looked at me when he said ‘fear’.

He wanted me to know, as a small boy, that men can be frightened too.

He said that the noise was deafening, it was hard to keep upright & running, & that it was difficult not to fall over (I didn’t ask, but in films you see the surf trundling dead men’s bodies) & he ran.

He said he focused on one foot in front of the other.

Bullets, he whispered, sliced the air. He could feel them all around.

And one particular sound. An impact, a groan & a sodden splash.

He ran, fast as fuck, he didn’t look back & here he was standing, leaning on a rake looking at 12y old me.

That splash, he said, that was my best friend’s body.

I looked at him & he was reliving the past; his still clear blue eyes regarding a Dublin garden & a French Beach.

That generation, who fought, because they morally believed in defeating the evil of invasion & defying the nihilism of Fascism, have almost all left us now.

Bill was a moral man, a sailor & someone who shared the worst moment of his life with me.

He made the world safe for toddlers to dream of moons & welding.

I know he would be horrified to think that Fascists have taken over the streets of his beloved Dublin.