I went down for the papers with Paul and saw Chirpy sitting on the seat at the crossroads with his red hat on. A lorry hooted and he gave a jovial wave.
“Hello,” he said in his Cornish Liskeard accent when he saw me, “how are you and the boys, do you like my hat?”
I said I hadn’t seen him recently.
“You see I get a touch of blood pressure when I get up in the mornings. I get blots in front of my eyes, and go a bit dizzy. I’m getting the doctor to look in later today. Sun’s bad for me so I’m not down as much as I used to be – I wear my hat now. Still I’m eighty-five next month.”
“Wonderful,” I said.
“I was in the trenches in the First World War, and I’m eighty-five next month so I haven’t done badly.”
“Trenches,” I said sitting down beside him and observing his hooked nose and the magnetism of his ancient mariner’s eye. “You must have been very interested in the Falklands, what with the mud there.”
He waved at another lorry driver whose arm was flapping at him out of the window. “Doe,” he said scathingly, “this Falklands business makes us old-timers sick, all this flag-waving for them when they come home, you know it’s all a lot of nonsense. I was in the trenches two years and four months, under shelling, and I saw thousands dead and when we came home there was nothing for us, nothing. No one ever knew I was home. And I was in the Second World War. I think it’s all political. Margaret Thatcher is building it up to build herself up. Yes, we saw it all. Nineteen sixteen I was in the trenches – all over. The Somme, everywhere. Saw thousands of them lying around like dead ducks, people we knew, people from other regiments, we just passed them by, no one took any notice. We had to walk over duckboards and keep going under shelling and there were water-filled trenches on either side, and if anyone stumbled because the boards were slippery and he had a heavy machine-carbine on his back and fell into the water, no one stopped to help him, we had to keep going. Saw the man in front of me drown like that several times, no one thought anything of it. Saw General Haig once.”
“Oh,” I said spellbound, “the books say he sent thousands to their deaths –”
“No, we loved him,” said Mr Roberts. “He kept behind us most of the time, we were in front of course, but he came up occasionally, and I saw him just the once. We all loved him. No, this lot make us old folk sick, because we never had anything done for us.”