My grandfather served in the trenches, but he declined to talk about it. I suppose the horrors had been insupportable. If he had lived day and night with those memories, it might have destroyed the life he built up at home, as a headmaster in a mill town near Manchester. Recently one of his pupils, now very old herself, wrote to me and recalled that he was fair, but very firm. ‘He caned me a few times!’ she wrote, yet seems to have regarded him highly. It opened a window into an alien world, in which a thoroughly decent, respected man might cane a young girl, both regarding it as his duty.
That is one of the problems that is always going to hover over Birdsong (BBC1, Sunday), Sebastian Faulks’s endlessly popular novel. (On the London Tube it has always been as ubiquitous as Captain Corelli’s Mandolin; I have yet to see anyone reading, for example, London Fields by Martin Amis.)
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