Two Turtle Doves

The turtle dove can be identified by its ability - unique amongst Columbidae - to retract its whole head inside its body.

It's also very rare.  Driven out by the European Collared Dove apparently.

 Look at them, coming over here with their coo-coo calls and their little collars. Apparently, the Collared Dove is so good to eat, Italian men have been known to swap their girlfriends for one.   I got this little factet from an airgun mag in the 80s.  What this says about Collared Doves, Italian men, their girlfriends or me in the 80s, is anyone's guess.

 The Collared Dove didn't breed in the UK until the 1950s.  It first settled in Kent, Suffolk and in my grandfather's wooded garden in Essex.

That wasn't the most exciting thing to happen to him.  He was born in the early years of the 20th Century to a middle-aged German immigrant and the family maid.  His sister arrived a year or two later.  It was a very progressive age - after the death of Queen Victoria, everyone let it all hang out in ways that made the 60s look tame.  Harder drugs, more alternative lifestyles and free love were the order of the day for the Belle Epoque Edwardians - until it was all brutally swept away by the First World War.   For my grandfather, the high spot of these years was attending his parents' wedding - he was a teenager when his father's wife died, thereby allowing his parents to finally marry a week or so later.  Up until then, they'd been happily and unashamedly living in what was later known as 'sin'.

My great-grandfather was apparently known to everyone as 'Herman the German' until the WWI anti-German mood led to pin-pricking a random page of the London telephone directory and him becoming respectable Mr Bennett.  If it was good enough for the Royal Family... Up until then, he'd had the increasingly-unpopular but surprisingly prescient name of Herr Achtung-Spitfire.

My grandfather went to grammar school in Croydon alongside Malcolm Muggeridge.  But instead of becoming a journalist, spy and moral campaigner, he went to work at a stockbrokers in the city.  Pinstriped suit, bowler, umbrella and on the train to London every morning.  Stockbroking wasn't a great trade to be in during the Great Depression and to help make a bit of extra money, he wrote detective novels about murders on the Stock Exchange.  More on these another time.  When I've read them, probably.

He brought up his family in Essex.  A pre-war Essex that was a very different Essex to today’s Essex.  His Essex was Marple-esque Essex of fellow bowler-hatted commuters and maiden aunts; an Essex where the only stilettos were the murder weapons in his detective novels and the only orange tan was on the weekend brogues. 

He worked for a Japanese bank and found himself suddenly unemployed the day after Pearl Harbor.

He joined up and because he was Croydon born-and-bred, he became a junior officer in the Corps of Royal Canadian Engineers.  He hit the Normandy beaches on D-Day +1 and later helped to liberate Eindhoven. His unit built floating pontoon bridges for armour and the re-taking of the Low Countries was a busy and hairy time for him.  He collected all of his letters home and I had hoped to scan them in and turn them into a book.  However, they're full of British understatement and mostly concern food parcels and cigarettes. I assume that he didn't want to worry his family - the minutiae of an uncertain supply of food and fags must have been far more comforting for his wife and daughters than the blood and fire of Normandy.

One story that may sadly never be properly told was that his battle group liberated Herman Goering's private train.   Little is available on the net about the train so all I have to go on is his story that there was so much booze on this train that a whole battalion of war-hardened Canadian and British troops got bored with drinking.

My grandfather brought home a magnum of Goering's champagne and a silver schnapps mug with a swastika on it.  We opened the champagne about 15 years ago.  It had remembered the shock of being kidnapped and carried in a squaddie's kit bag in 1945 and indignantly spunked half its contents across the room and into my second cousin's handbag.  The other half of the bottle was like very fizzy sherry.

I still have the swastika-marked schnapps mug.  Behind the secret wall in my cellar.

My grandfather sent no letters between June 5th and June 11th 1944 and when he did send one, it pretty much said "Sorry for not writing. Been busy."

He returned home and went back to stockbroking.  Being smart with money, he was able to retire very early.  Not rich, just comfortable.  He could have stayed working and made himself rich.  Instead, as soon as he could afford to go, he did.  That gave him a 30 year retirement, which I feel made him the richer man.  I've recently worked out that when my youngest finishes vet school (she's a small girl therefore she wants to be a vet) is when I can start saving for my retirement.  I'll be 68.   *sigh*

My other grandfather had nothing much to do with stockbrokers or doves.  Although, if he'd seen the Collared Dove in my other grandfather's garden, he'd have tried to catch it and eat it.

He was a man who was born poor, lived poor and died poor but was always content with his lot - unfettered by ambition or greed.

He was a bugger for gadgets though.  He had a gramophone just before the First World War and on summer evenings used to play it in the garden of the families' tiny farm cottage.  People in the next village could hear it.  One even complained, which must one of the earliest complaints about young person's loud music.  His son - my father-  perfected the complaining, though.  My dad insisted that the words to every pop song were "Fuck fuck fuck you fuck me fuck your Mum!"  We probably shouldn't have been surprised to find out, on his death, that he was the singer from Slipknot.


My other grandfather had a bicycle with what was then a new-fangled 3-speed gear system.  He rode it to work every morning.  On every journey he'd pass a well-dressed gentlemen cycling the other way.   Every morning, my other grandfather would say "Morning!" and every morning the well-dressed gentlemen would blank him and say nothing.  After several months of "Morning!" and blanking, my grandfather tried a new approach.  Instead of a polite and cheery "Morning!", he bellowed "ARSEHOLES!".  The well-dressed gentlemen fell off his bike.   The next day though, it was back to "Morning!" and blanking.

He had a camera - we have the photos he took in Cirencester in the 1920s and 1930s - that he developed in the cupboard under the stairs.  He had a piano-accordion that only he could get a tune out of.

He also had significantly bad judgement.  This was most evident when he joined the army in 1914 to impress a girl.  She wasn't impressed and apart from a brief sojourn in the Bicycle Corps, he spent the next 4 years in the trenches in Flanders.  Because he was a six-foot-two Gloucestershire farm-boy, he was enlisted into the Durham Light Infantry. Based at the other end of England and made up almost entirely of poverty-stunted miners, it was perhaps not the best choice.  The regiment's nickname is the Bantams - because they are small, tough and wiry.  My grandfather was 8 to 10 inches taller than all his peers, which looks silly on the parade ground - they have the fastest marching rate in the British Army - and lethal in the trenches.  Despite being such an obvious target, he survived the trenches and like all who did, never talked about it.

Instead, he returned home and married a war-widow.  Well...   My grandmother wasn't strictly speaking a war-widow - her first husband had put his head in the oven on receipt of his call-up papers, which may be one in the eye for predeterminism but also very stupid..  Either way, they settled down, had my dad and my grandfather went to work at Cirencester brewery.  As a child, I always thought that he had had an important job that required him to taste the beer each morning.  No.  He simply got there early and snaffled a few pints before anyone else turned up.

His legacy was not large, being made up almost entirely of Gloucestershire phrases, only a few of which I can recall.

"Thys'll shit nine hedges over a crab tree" - said of eating any 'suspicious'  food or drink.  I guess nine hedges over a crab tree is an archaic measure of distance, like a furlong or a rod.  Whatever it is, it does seem an impressive distance to shit.


"As full of wind as a barbers cat".   No idea.  Did he get wind and air mixed up?

"Thee cassent yut flowers"  Said disparigingly of anyone who grew flowers and not veg.

"Slipperier than a cats arse in June" - said of anything slippy.  This one is pretty dodgy and may be connected to his cousin who was in trouble with the law over undisclosed 'farmyard crimes' over near South Cerney according to the parish records and a sadistic woodwork teacher from South Cerney who took pleasure in telling me this aged 13 in front of the whole class.


His last words were "Didn't we have fun?"  That's the way to do it.