British schoolboys doubtless have quite different fantasies nowadays, but for much of the last century most of them liked to imagine themselves leading their friends in guerrilla warfare against the German army. Stephen Grady is probably unique in having lived the fantasy, an experience he recalls in Gardens of Stone.
Born in 1925, in the French village of Nieppe, just over the border with Belgium, he was the elder son of a Royal Artillery corporal who married a Frenchwoman and was a gardener for the Imperial War Graves Commission. In the first world war the district had been a battlefield, and the infant Stephen played marbles with shrapnel, in a house built from rubble and in gardens pegged out with bayonets. He tells his story in brief chapters, exactly dated and vividly anecdotal, in the historic present tense.
A mischievous boy, he is given to such practical jokes as knocking on people’s front doors and running away, and puncturing bicycle tyres. He and his friend Roussel watch men visiting Au Petit Galopin, the local brothel, those going in seeming ‘somehow more cheerful than the ones coming out’, and in December 1936 they upset the 50-gallon oil drum that serves as its pissoir, flooding the place with ancient urine.
The next year Grady is sent for three terms to a school at Ramsgate, where he struggles with compound interest in pounds, shilling and pence, and is confirmed in his identity as a rosbif. On his return he attends the Eton Memorial School at Ypres, established for the children of IWGC workers in Belgium and France.
In May 1938, hunting frogs with his best friend Marcel, he finds a Lee Enfield rifle in a drainage ditch. In September 1939 one of his neighbours is called up: ‘I can’t help smiling as I watch his wife and daughters weeping on the doorstep.
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