When you move house — really move I mean: garage sale, auction, innumerable trips to the dump, massive book culling, the full catastrophe — you encounter, slowly and over the months of gradually diminishing disruption, two contradictory results. One is you find things that you hadn't seen for ages or scarcely knew you possessed, and the other is you lose things, sometimes, it would seem, forever.
Probably because Anzac Day was looming, I became aware a week or so ago that I had not seen anywhere a framed photograph of my grandfather, Alexander Murray.
He gazes out from an ornate, scrolled oval frame with a gentle slightly bemused look to him. The face is thin, boyish and overshadowed by the too large military cap. On either side of the portrait hang his medals on faded ribbon and beneath is a citation in which futility grapples with dignity:
He whom this scroll commemorates was numbered among those who, at the call of King and Country, left all that was dear to them, endured hardness, faced danger, and finally passed out of the sight of men by the path of self sacrifice, giving up their own lives that others might live in freedom. Let those who come after see to it that his name be not forgotten.
Alex married 21-year-old Annie Carroll, a slim, dark, Irish immigrant, in Glasgow and they lived in Glasgow's grim slum, the Gorbals, where, in due course, their two sons and two daughters were born. Alex was planning to take his impoverished but close and happy family to Canada or Australia when, with bewildering urgency, he became 17051 Private Alexander Murray, Driver, Army Service Corps, and, after some training, went to France.
By the beginning of 1918, Alex was surviving but shattered in spirit. 'My dearest Ann,' he wrote:
... leave is still stopped, but when it starts I shall get away on leave, it is hard lines. My dearest Ann, if it is not too much trouble you might send me on a small parcel and when I do come home I shall give you as much money as I can. I wish this war was finished for I am fed up. My dear Ann, you and the children try to be as cheery as you can. I feel all buggered up but I