FraserWords

On Sunday, my seven-year-old son Jamie carried the flag of his Beavers troop at the village remembrance service. I was very proud of him, and jolly glad to have the chance to watch him.

I’ll tell you one reason why.

Some time on April 6^th 1917, my son’s nearly-namesake great-great uncle, 22-year-old James Fraser, took a pencil and wrote, in his Army paybook: “In the event of my death I leave all my property and effects to my sweetheart…”

He was a kilted private soldier in the 6^th battalion of the Gordon Highlanders. He and his fellow troops were in tents in the Bois de Maroeuil, near Ecoivres, on the Arras front. They were listening to lectures and undergoing training, including in wire cutting and bomb throwing, for an attack. The knowledge of the attack to come must have prompted James to write those words, or maybe an officer instructed his men to do so.

If he was anything like my grandfather, his brother, he was a runt of a man, ill-nourished, raised motherless in the back streets of Dundee. Their mum died a week after giving birth to my granddad, of puerperal fever, a terrible but common cause of death among women in poverty. James had been a farm hand in the Fife countryside, near St Andrew’s. If he was like my grandfather, James would have had a prominent chin, and liked a drink. He may have been cross-eyed like his absent dad, his nephew (my father), and me. His voice may have sounded like my grandfather’s, tight-lipped, clipped, terse, unmistakeably Dundee.

In his will, James’s handwriting is big and clumsy but the address of his sweetheart clear. He has spelt her surname incorrectly, but made a correction with his pencil. His signature is neat, careful and, I imagine, painfully learnt.

James Fraser’s sweetheart, at home in Aberdeen, was pregnant. Her state of mind we can only imagine: unmarried, her unborn child’s dad at daily risk and therefore her future well-being, and the child’s, very uncertain.

Early on the morning of April 9^th 1917, the Gordon Highlanders piled over the top and charged the Germans facing them at Arras. In the ensuing chaos, an ammunition dump blew up, taking many of the Scots with it. Seventy Gordon Highlanders lost their lives that day.

James Fraser was wounded in the attack on the first day of the Battle of Arras. We don’t know what sort of wound or how long he lay at a collecting post of the Highland Field Ambulance. I imagine he stayed at the collecting post because, as so often happened, a front line medic had judged his life unsaveable and concentrated on those who had a better chance.

We don’t know what sort of pain he was in. We don’t know whether he knew he was dying, or was conscious at all. We can hope a mate pressed a smoke on him, that somebody found a drink for him, that he was warm, that maybe somebody spoke a soft word to him. If he had moments of consciousness, we can imagine he thought of his ‘sweetheart’ as he lay there. I rather hope he did not know his child was growing inside her, for that pain would surely have been unbearable.

At some point on April 10^th 1917, the day after he was wounded, James Fraser died. He is buried at Roclincourt Cemetery, one of those rows upon row of white headstones so familiar from the television.

He was unremembered for many years. His father and young sister were in America, having abandoned my grandad and James in Scotland. My grandfather lost contact with James in wartime and, penniless and with a growing family in the 1920s, had concerns that stopped him, as far as we know, finding out about his brother.

Only when my own father wanted to know more of the family history and solve some of the puzzles that had bothered him for years did I unearth James Fraser’s sad story. After more than 80 years, his brother’s descendants were able to remember him.

His sweetheart’s family knew little of him. We can imagine the stigma of Barbara’s unmarried motherhood, though her fate was far from rare in wartime. James and Barbara’s child grew up not knowing about her father, and little of him was passed on in the family.

It was only when my researches put me in touch with the descendants of James Fraser’s sweetheart that we realised an echo of him had indeed survived the years. The only memory the family he never knew had of him was in the two Christian names his sweetheart gave their little girl: Jamesina Fraser.

He is very distant to my boy and I, and to his descendants in Aberdeen (where his grand-daughter is the spitting image of my sister, his great-niece), but we are all here and we will remember James Fraser.

Feeling flat

So after the parade on Sunday we had family round for lunch, and then we cleared tons and tons of junk out of the flat-roofed room at the end of our new abode. This was because the following day, the flat-roofers were coming to replace the leaking roof.

It took a long, long time to move all the stuff we’d stored there temporarily, but, exhausted, we finally achieved an empty room in which the workmen could labour.

You’re ahead of me, aren’t you?

On Monday the roofers arrived. I showed them into the empty room. “Thanks mate, now we’d better get on,” said the chief roofer. “Eh?” “Oh, we don’t need to come in here….”

How we chuckled.

By the way, I recommend D&C Flat Roofing: really nice, efficient guys and boy do they work..

Painful lesson?

I’m worried anew about the debt crisis and the lessons it teaches us.

All the countries mired deep in the financial doo-doo are all the countries that have the best time: the Irish and their craic, the Italians and their irresistible love of life, the Greeks in their eternal sunshine.

All the countries with a reputation for being clever but miserable and humourless are doing just fine: the Swedes, the Germans. I’ll leave you to work out where I think the English stand in this…

Will it teach our children not to have a good time?

Maybe there will be better lessons: the countries doing best are the countries with solid social policies and strong welfare states, for example. Some people – the Americans – are learning that greed, selfishness and ignorance have consequences.

Me, I’m going to start planting vegetables and maybe buy a pig.

And finally…

Thanks, as always, for the comments – even though I’m sometimes not too sure what you’re on about. Sister Guide, welcome aboard. As you can see, we need a voice of reason.