Lieutenant Joseph Guy went over the top at Passchendaele with the rest of his unit,  a  battalion of The Green Howards, on a grey wet day in October of 1917, and was shot in the chest at some point as he lead other brave men of his regiment from the British lines towards the German positions they had been tasked with assaulting. The round that hit him shattered a number of ribs, puncturing his left lung – missing his heart by inches – and exited his back, taking with it a chunk of  flesh and splintered bones the size of a plate. I can see him collapsing forwards into a heap in the mud like a puppet whose strings had all been cut at once, hitting the ground with his chin and then his teeth. I’ve read accounts of others who have been shot and invariably they will say that the shock of impact comes with no immediate pain. It has been likened to being hit by a bolt of lightning as the surge of energy short-circuits every impulse in the body. One is just reduced, momentarily, to a helpless mound as shock sets in. I do not suppose he felt much pain when he came round to his senses of sorts. He turned over onto his back, his body drenched, noticing the sucking sound his chest made as he tried to breath – that ferric froth in his mouth – and thinking quietly of nothing but regret. And there he lay for hours, perhaps a day or more, slipping in and out of consciousness, neither feeling the cold or the wet or the pain…just regret, when what was left of life in him would allow him to feel anything at all.

The story goes that at some point he was dragged back by the scruff of his tunic to a dressing station behind British lines but, being seemingly unresponsive, triage dictated that despite his faint pulse he had not long to live and he was placed in a long line of other men who were expected to die soon. As the battle progressed, others were placed next to  him; a communion of the dead and the soon to die. It must have been the movement of his foot or the involuntary tremor of his hand that betrayed his desire to live and he was pulled out of this pile of corpses, if only for a while. The Padre was summoned and he was given his last rites. Was there anything he might want in his last moments, he was asked. Joseph Guy asked for a glass of champagne and amazingly some was found for him. To his dying day – twenty eight years later – he swore that that sip of champagne restored life in him when he was on the verge of dying.

Joseph Guy was the tenth child of twelve; the last male and last child of his father’s first marriage before his father married again to have another two children. His father was a man of middle-class stock from Whitby who had amassed a considerable fortune as a ship-chandler in Workington, Cumbria, dispatching his many children as they came of age to the various corners of the Empire; mostly to Canada. Joseph Guy, when his time came, however, eventually wound up in Sicily to work for the Marsala Wine Company, albeit after a spell in Canada. There he not only learned a trade but he also acquired a love for Italy and its culture in all its aspects. Those ten years before the war were undoubtedly the happiest years of his life. I have read some of the many letters he wrote to his various sisters to recount his goings-on. They are beautifully written – quite descriptive and full of anecdotes and observations about brigands and carnivals, good meals, attractive women, the latest trainee sent out from England, excursions to visit Greek ruins –  and are a testament to the quiet, wholesome happiness of a man in his prime; content and engaged with his life and his surroundings.

By the time he was demobilized  in 1918 he returned to England a taciturn and sullen man. I’m not quite certain what he did in the years immediately after the war but he seems to have fallen soon into marriage in the most matter of fact sort of way. “ I think I may just ask Ethel to marry me” is what I remember having been told he wrote to one of his sisters of his seemingly incidental up-coming betrothal. By all accounts she was an odd and difficult woman and something of a religious zealot to boot. She gave him two sons in quick succession following the loss of a girl in infancy in 1919; Wilfred, born in about 1921 and the second, Vernon Guy, my Grandfather, in 1923. It turns out my grandfather was unwanted by her and was certainly the wrong sex as  she had hoped for a girl. She refused to see him for months after he was born, handing him over to a wet nurse, and packed him off to boarding school at the tender age of about four, if I’m not mistaken, which was pretty extreme even by the standards of the day.

The years between the wars were tough for Joseph Guy as he struggled to make ends meet as a poultry farmer. My grandfather speaks of him always with profound tenderness; remembering him as a sober, hardworking, kind man albeit a distant and uncommunicative father given to bouts of introspection. He most probably also withdrew even further into himself to escape the overbearing antics of his complex wife. Italian Opera, I’m told, was his fortress of solitude. He never opened himself up to my grandfather until very shortly before he died and this was only for the briefest of time. It was in November of 1944 and my great grandparents had had the misfortune of having their house in Southborough flattened by a V-2 rocket that no doubt fell thirty miles short of its intended target, London. The ship my grandfather was serving on happened to be in port at the time and he was granted forty-eight hours of compassionate leave to help his parents salvage what they could from the rubble and help them get settled in emergency accommodation. I’ve no idea what they spoke of over those two days but my grandfather says it was the only time he ever felt his father allowed him in, so to speak, to meet the man behind the mask. They never spoke again as two months later Joseph Guy was dead; prematurely, as an indirect result of his war wounds.

The pallbearers at his military funeral were all Italian as it happened. When war broke out in 1939 he was too old to fight but he reenlisted, being commissioned as a Captain in the Royal Artillery, serving initially in an anti-aircraft unit. Following the defeat of the Italians in North Africa and the capture of huge numbers of prisoners he was transferred to the Pioneer Corps as an interpreter, ending up at the Italian Prisoner of War camp in Tonbridge. He must have been loved and respected by the prisoners as it was they who requested the honour of carrying his coffin on that snow covered day in January.

My father tells me his grandmother continued to receive Christmas cards from former Italian prisoners, addressed to her husband, until well into the fifties. One can only presume they were unaware that he was long since dead.