Curtains for Churchill

My three-and-a-half year old self was recovering from measles on the day of Churchill's funeral and I spent the day on the settee alternately lying under a blanket and playing with the bow and arrow set my grandparents had given me as a 'get well' gift - the furniture bore the circles from direct arrow hits for weeks afterwards. The day was also special because I remember being cared for by grandma and granddad. At some point as the ceremony unfolded on TV, my granddad decided to close the living room curtains as a mark of respect. They did things like that in those days, or, more particularly, my granddad did. He'd spent his formative years 'in service' as a footman, and this had left a rather confusing legacy: he distrusted the toffs, but had an instinctive sense of place. While he got on well with my Labour-voting dad, his son-in-law never forgot that granddad was a member of that confusing breed - a working class Tory. I can't remember now how dad found out about the curtains, it might be that I mentioned it in all innocence when he got home from work, but however he got to know, the response was surprising and has gone down in family legend. Dad was mild-mannered and jovial, but he let us know he wasn't happy about the respect accorded to Churchill by his own drapery. Dad fought in North Africa and Italy during WWI, and while he recognised that Churchill had been a great war-time leader, he also knew he had made mistakes and swapped parties, apparently to gain political advantage. Churchill's ratting and re-ratting, which saw him transfer allegiance from Tory to Liberal and back to Tory was evidence, in dad's opinion, of an untrustworthy side to his character. This was further compounded for dad as - along with many other Eighth Army veterans - he felt that Churchill had reneged on a promise that they would be brought home after the victory in North Africa. Instead, they were sent to Italy - where, in Churchill's words they would have the easy job of destroying 'the soft underbelly of the Axis crocodile'. This turned out to be far from the truth and the First, Fifth and Eighth Armies spent three years, often poorly fed and ill-equipped, fighting against determined German resistance as they advanced the full length of Italy's elongated boot. After D-Day, dad and his comrades in arms also had to endure the put-down that they were 'D-Day Dodgers', who should be fighting in Normandy, instead of 'sunning' themselves in Italy. In typical squaddie fashion, the term of derision was turned into a badge of honour and became an anthem to the largely forgotten suffering they endured in the Italian campaign. We played the song at dad's funeral, and when the TV footage shows the London docks lowering their jibs in homage and the crowds lining the route to mark the 50th anniversary of Churchill's funeral, I think I'll play it again, because the man who led the nation to victory had his flaws and failings too.