“I kept me ‘ead down, me mouth shut and I didn’t volunteer for nuthin”

My wife’s old uncle was a bit of a scoundrel .  He survived the trenches of the First World War with his Lancashire regiment. In chatting with him in the 1950s I asked him how he survived and he replied with the above aphorism.

He told me that he was a teenager in Liverpool when the First World War broke out. His folks ran a fish and chip shop. He played the trumpet.  When conscription came in he very reluctantly had to join the local regiment. He says that he suddenly developed poor vision and  was reduced to wearing thick glasses which were just that- plain glass!  So they put him in the band and he happily toodled along marching with his trumpet. 

However at some point he was found out, his glasses were confiscated and he found himself in the trenches ,the battle of the Somme .Terrible. His school mates killed around him. The shelling was continuous and difficult to endure. Hand to hand trench fighting was the worst. When their trench was attacked and about to be over run they abandoned shooting they would scramble out over the back of the trench and face the charging enemy with the trench between as being caught down in the trench was a death warrant. He wasn’t exposed to poison gas. Only seventeen of his original group survived .

So he made it. He lived into his 90s. His family emigrated to Canada before the second

World war and ran a fish and chip shop in Victoria BC. His first marriage failed. He had two sons one of which was very difficult and caused him a lot of problems to a point where he changed his surname to Vickers, the name of a machine gun and eventually took to spending a lot of time in Jamaica. Eventually he proudly appeared in Victoria with a sprightly Jamaican lady in her thirties whom he married  ( well done unc)

He enjoyed robust health until his mid nineties. One morning his wife heard a bump on the upstairs bedroom. He was dead on the floor. 

Joan and her Uncle Firth in Liverpool 1935