Bookended by bats

It has rained on and off for much of today, and the temperature has dropped. It is hard to believe that this is the last Saturday in May. This time last week was so very different.

Then we woke at 4.30 a.m. and took our mugs of tea into the garden, sitting on the bench looking out over the pond. It was very still. As the sky lightened, we first heard and then watched bats skimming the top of the wall behind us, before dipping over the pond and away. Bird song was almost the only sound: Blackbird, Blue tit, later Jackdaws and Rooks waking up. In the distance we could hear the occasional sheep in the Sentry. No traffic. For a brief moment there were both birds – Swifts, Swallows, House Martins – and bats in the sky, before we watched the bats disappear, one squeezing between the slate and the wall on our gable end. And then there was a buzzing of insects, and the cries of Swifts pierced our sleepiness. Back to bed for a couple more hours sleep, and by that time the town was awake.

It was a day spent in the garden: tidying, planting, watering, pottering around and potting up, to say nothing of breakfast and lunch outside.

And then driving south and west to the north coast of Cornwall, and a 60th birthday party. A warm, shirt-sleeve evening, a barbecue and another meal outside, as we watched the sun set over the Atlantic. And as the Swallows and Martins were lost in the dusk, we once more saw and heard bats. A perfect day.

171st Field Ambulance, R.A.M.C at Dunkirk

My father’s war was, by and large, a quiet war. A Territorial, he was called up in the summer of 1939, and demobbed in late 1944. Birmingham born and bred, my father had trained in Birmingham, and in the latter part of the 1930s he shared a general practice with his father in Edgbaston. Just short of 29 on the outbreak of war, his first posting was to 143rd Field Ambulance. He was in England during the Phoney War of late 1939 and early 1940, in Northern Ireland from late 1940 until 1943, “somewhere on the South Coast” in the six months before D-Day, and then returned to civilian general practice in autumn of 1944.

But for seven days, 70 years ago, he was on active service at Dunkirk.

My father very rarely spoke about that week. As a young boy, eager to know what my father had done in the war, I asked a great many questions – and got very little by way of reply, other than that he had been sent to Dunkirk early in the evacuation, as they were running short of medical officers, and thought he had been on one of the last boats out. Years later, his batman Perry, visiting my father in his retirement, told me that as they reached the beach, and notwithstanding air attacks, my father had sat on a folding chair and checked the stores ashore, asking Perry to empty two large stone jars of rum to prevent temptation.

That was it. No heroics, no stories of derring-do: all very understated and, even if a cliché, very English.

When my father died we found a canvas backed notebook among the papers in his desk, that he had intended to be “The Private Life of the Officers Mess of 171st Field Ambulance R.A.M.C.”. The first entry is 17 November 1939, when his Field Ambulance was formed, spun out of 143rd Field Ambulance; the last on 5 June 1940, when my father and the four other officers who had been at Dunkirk with him returned to “Castleman’s” at Hare Hatch for a celebration dinner in the Mess. The menu, signed by each of them, is still in the journal. Nothing else follows: it seems that that week changed for ever the way he looked at the war. And even 40 years later he was reluctant to talk about it.

In this week when Dunkirk is back in our minds, I looked out the journal, and re-read the entries for those seven days. The account is sparse and the language rather formal: written up immediately after my father’s return. But its very ordinariness makes it all the more powerful. This is my father’s record of that week: the only record I have.

“May 25th

Bill, Charlie, Michael, George and Victor departed in full battle order complete with valises, ten N.O.s and a nasty feeling in the stomach bound for Dover and ultimately Dunkirk. On arrival at Dover we found that we were part of a collection of about 30 M.O.s who were to assist in the treatment of casualties during the evacuation of Dunkirk. Bill being the only captain present was put in charge of the whole under command of Colonel Blake and was responsible for the organisation and on successive days made five or six trips to and from and into Dunkirk itself.

May 26th

Charles, George, Michael and Victor sailed on the destroyer H.M.S. Verity and it being found impossible to land them in Dunkirk harbour owing to the excessive number of bombs falling in that area they were taken about two miles up the beach and landed from a flat-bottomed boat, having to wade the last 25 yards complete with full kit, stores, food etc.

The first dressing station of the 171st Field Ambulance under active service conditions was then opened in an abandoned ambulance just to the left of a Sanitorium.

May 27th

The four M.O.s moved up to Bray Dunes and placed themselves under the command of I Corps. During this move Michael returning to look for one of the N.O.s became separated from the other three and later in the day became attached to the 126th Field Ambulance remaining in the A.D.S. at Bray Dunes with only their commanding officer, finally leaving Dunkirk via the Mole on Saturday evening and arriving back in Dover on Sunday.

The other three moved about two miles inland where they established an A.D.S. under command of Lt. Babty in an estaminet on a cross roads. They remained there until the night of June 1st when having received orders to close the A.D.S. they drove by ambulance to the Mole from which they hoped to embark.

Having slowly progressed along the Mole during the early hours of June 2nd (Sunday) at day-break all troops on the Mole were told that no more could be taken off owing to the danger of attack from the air.

They then returned to the dock-basin and the whole party sticking together managed to obtain a rowing boat in which they proceeded to row out to sea.

Just as they got into the open sea they were picked up by a French Mine-layer, which to their horror returned to Dunkirk harbour; it remained there during the hours of daylight and finally at dusk slipped out of the harbour en route for Dover where they arrived on the morning of June 3rd.

June 5th

The five returned to Castleman’s where a special celebration was held, so much so that George gradually became quite inarticulate and finally retired gracefully to bed.”

I don’t know who Bill, Michael, George and Victor were. Charles/Charlie was my father. He and my mother were married on 18 May 1940, on his embarkation leave, and Bill, Michael and George were groomsmen. I have a photograph of them outside the marquee, all three in uniform, holding glasses of champagne and smoking cigarettes. The silver salver that the Field Ambulance gave my parents as a wedding present, engraved with all their signatures, was stolen 30 years ago.

H.M.S Verity survived the war. For much of the Battle of the Atlantic she was a convoy escort ship with the 18th Destroyer Flotilla. At Dunkirk, she came under fire from shore batteries near Calais and suffered casualties.

In the BBC -WW2 People’s War: An Archive of World War Two memories – written by the public, gathered by the BBC – the story told by my father in his journal is also told by John Larner, whom I have never met but who must have been one of the ten N.O.s with 171st Field Ambulance. His account is slightly fuller, the facts marginally different but I have no doubt he was in my father’s party. The differences may be because my father wrote his journal up in the week following the return from Dunkirk; John Larner told his story in 2004.

The BBC -WW2 People’s War archive can be found at bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar

Big Brother is still with us, but for how long?

The Telegraph had another story this morning about RIPA and CCTV intrusion (probably serves me right for reading this particular title). But like John Naughton on Memex 1.1 yesterday, I too wonder whether our new government will “deliver on the rolling back of the national security state”, standing by its commitment in its policy document “to implement a full programme of measures to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties under the Labour government and roll back state intrusion”.

The last government never admitted that it presided over the most authoritarian government this country has seen outside of wartime. Commenting on the plans to scrap ID cards, the National Identity register and the ContactPoint database, regulate CCTV, and restore rights to non-violent protest, a Labour spokesman continued to trot out the fiction that Britain was not a surveillance society.

The problem, as so often is the case, is the gap between intention and reality, and the insidious effect of policy creep.

A Surveillance Society? – The Government Reply to the Fifth Report from the Home Affairs Committee, given in July 2008, recognised the issues,

Ensuring the application of proportionality and maintaining the appropriate balance is key to providing the right level of safeguards for the public and providing the right level of service to the public. That approach will continue to be adopted in all that we do. The Government acknowledges concerns raised in some quarters that this balanced approach always starts out as the ideal but gradually, the balance between the rights of the individual and the powers of the ‘centre’ is severely tilted. That is why in successive pieces of legislation we have made it clear on the face of the Act exactly what can and cannot be introduced by secondary legislation and why there is a requirement for such secondary legislation to be put before Parliament for approval.

But what the Government said, and what it and its agent did, were very different. Will this government avoid this?

As John Naughton says, “I’m not holding my breath”.

Twittering the Billable Hour

Why am I on Twitter? The family have stopped asking, and just accept that although I long ago got rid of my BlackBerry and obsession with emails, this has been replaced by an equally worrying (to them) interest in Web 2.0: Twitter, FourSquare, Spotify, Feedly ~ to say nothing of FB and LinkedIn.

It is always easy to justify one’s peculiarities (not least as to you they are not peculiar at all) but lately I have been giving some thought as to whether Twitter is really of any value, other than to boast about my homegrown asparagus. I am quite sure that it is. For me its value lies in the links I find. These may be to legal or management articles or blog posts, be about current affairs, or, very close to my heart, bird sightings. And all delivered (usually with a little help from bit.ly) in 140 characters.

The result is that I have access to an enormous range of thought.

A very good example was a tweet by Patrick Lamb (@ValoremLamb) yesterday, which took me to the Law Society of Western Australia’s website – and ultimately allowed me to download The Chief Justice of Western Australia’s address to the Perth Press Club, “Billable Hours – past their use by date”, given on 17 May to launch Law Week 2010. It is an excellent analysis, given, as the Chief Justice admits, “with a view to stimulating interest and debate, which may in turn accelerate changes which are already evident in some parts of the profession”.

You need to read the speech for yourselves (it’s a pdf on the website). It is pretty even-handed (what would you expect from a lawyer?) and he sets out both the advantages and the disadvantages, which will be familiar to most lawyers here and there. But one particular paragraph caught my eye:

Focuses on hours, not value

Time costing focuses the efforts of the legal practitioner upon the production of billable hours, rather than the production of value for the client. It rewards efforts and not results, promotes quantity over quality, repetition over creativity.

There is quite a lot more like that, but even though the Chief Justice accepts that “time billing has a place in legal service charging” he is quite clear that there are other methods “which encourage efficiency and better allocate risk”.

Certainly not out of the woods yet

Nick Robinson is so often spot on. From his Newslog about the reactions of the Chancellor and two would-be Chancellors to Ken Clarke’s comments about a hung Parliament,

So, on a day when unemployment rose to the highest level seen since 1994 and at a time when all parties agree we are facing the worst budgetary crisis and the biggest spending cuts in decades, these three [Darling, Osborne and Cable] argued about the only fact that has electrified this election – opinion polls which suggest the likelihood of a hung Parliament – and which, whisper who dares, might turn out to be wrong.

Let’s hope so.

And as for the unemployment figures (8 per cent of the workforce, taking it to the highest since 1996), Yvette Cooper, Work and Pensions Minister, was quoted as saying “we are not out of the woods yet.”