An ordinary man who had done extraordinary things

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 26 MAY 2002

IT IS EASY to be dismissive of television. In fact it is so easy that generally it is the people who watch it least who feel most qualified to dismiss it. “Oh, I never turn on the TV,” they will say, with a tone of voice and cast of head and gleam of eye that suggests a certain pride in accomplishment, as though not watching television made them somehow smarter and more interesting than the rest of us who do. It is as though they feel that not watching television makes them better conversationalists, witty and thoughtful and more knowledgeable about Abstract Expressionism, say, or the causes of the failure of the Weimar republic.

I am not sure why they think this. It is not as if they use their non-television-watching time to read an improving book or learn a new language or solve Fermat’s last theorem. If not watching television were a marker of great cultural or intellectual attainment, we might expect more Nobel prizes or contract bridge champions to emerge from the painted tribes of the Brazilian rainforests. Tibetan yakherds would be more in demand as guests at cocktail parties around the world. People who do not watch television are like people who live in Cape Town: they are irrationally proud of something which involves not doing anything in particular. The rest of us, poor slobs, have to try to be proud of the things we actually do.

It annoys me, frankly. People who can extract no value from a medium reveal more about themselves than about the medium. There are joys that television has brought into my life that I could have experienced nowhere else. An example was the chance encounter I had on Discovery Channel last week.

Aimlessly flipping through the channels, as I do of an evening while waiting for the drink to take effect, I landed midway through a show called War Heroes. The series is dedicated to remembering, and if possible interviewing, the men and women who in times of conflict have distinguished themselves by the kind of unthinking, reflexive selflessness that makes for heroism. It is the kind of selflessness – otherwise called bravery – that we all hope we have, but can never know until the moment comes when it is called upon.

I missed the name of the man being interviewed, which was somehow appropriate. He was known during the war as the Wheelbarrow VC. He was awarded the Victoria Cross for, among other things, running through the crossfire of no-man’s-land to collect a wounded comrade, then braving the shells and shrapnel of an enemy mortar barrage to bring him back in, of all things, a captured German wheelbarrow. He is very old now, a slim man with fragile hands and Brylcreem in his immaculate hair, but his features are recognisably those of the impossibly handsome young man in the fading photographs. He sat beside his wife on a chintz sofa in the Essex countryside, frowning uncomfortably at his fingernails.

The Wheelbarrow VC refused to talk about his heroism. He refused to discuss or even describe what happened. After more than 50 years of living quietly in his country cottage, married to the woman who was his wartime sweetheart, he was embarrassed that someone should be making a fuss all over again.

In a private interview, his wife confided: “He doesn’t like to be thought of as a hero. He always says that he did what he did because it had to be done, not because it was a heroic thing to do. That’s why he won’t speak about it.”

I caught my breath. In the age of Oprah, that makes him a hero all over again.

In the sight of the man, sitting gently in an old darned cardigan, occasionally turning to gaze fondly through the window at a garden lovingly tended, a vegetable patch neat with marrows and watercress and beans, a small corner of a world he helped keep safe for a little while longer, there was something that moved me unutterably. He was a quiet, ordinary man, living a quiet, ordinary life, desiring nothing more than to continue in quietness and ordinariness and privacy, who had once done extraordinary things.

There was nothing staged in his reticence. In his awkward, fidgeting, dignified silence there was a glimpse of all that I find wonderful in human beings. I felt honoured to have seen it. And only television – of all the media that have ever existed – could have offered me precisely that glimpse.

The Wheelbarrow VC refused to contribute, so the show was pieced together with newsreels and clippings and the memories of the surviving members of his unit. One of his former comrades remembered how, every day for two weeks, the Wheelbarrow VC would leopard crawl across no-man’s-land with a pocket of hand grenades to eliminate the Germans manning a forward machine-gun post. He was wounded in the shoulder by a German sniper, but he returned, again and again. The interviewer raised this with the Wheelbarrow VC. For the first time the Wheelbarrow VC ceased to look uncomfortable. He looked up, and in his faded blue eyes there was the fierce light of sudden emotion, and an expression of something like wonder.

“Every day they were killed,” he said, “and every day there were new soldiers there. They knew they would die, but they kept manning the post.”

He shook his head, and his eyes became moist and something caught at his voice. Unobtrusively, his wife lowered her eyes and pressed her knee against his. In the silence a clock ticked.

“The Germans,” he said at last, still shaking his head in wonder and sorrow and something deeper that we who have not been to war can never understand, “those Germans were so brave.”