The boys’ brigade

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.