Thurs 25th April (Anzac Day) 1991
In Gloucestershire
In Gloucestershire
It's Anzac morning. By now back home a hundred thousand old diggers have already marched themselves to a standstill and are recuperating over beers and tall stories. Here it’s just another day, a grey sky all over, a cold edge in the air, and hazy with it, the smoke from a multitude of wood and coal fires hangs flat, drifts sideways, spreads into a blue haze that isn’t going anywhere till it’s windy again.We fell over a great TV doco a while back, about an old WWI grass airfield that used to be near the small farming town of Leighterton up the road, run by the Air Ministry from about 1910 to 1920. Apparently it was taken over by the Australian Flying Corps late in the war for the training of pilots for combat over France, and by all accounts they were quite a cavalier bunch of Aussie derring-do’s who totally won over the hearts of the locals in the year or so that they were here. The twenty-eight of them who are buried in the local cemetery in Aust Air Corps graves are a testament to the dicey nature of training in those wood-and-string ‘kites’.
We pack up the camper and head out, pull in to the local garage to find out exactly where the airfield itself was – nothing but farmer’s fields today – and the lass at the pumps points it out to us, the one over the road behind the ‘Aerodrome Cafe’. But then we’re shattered to hear, after so much manipulation of the our agenda so that we could be here for it, that the annual British Legion ceremony in the village is always on the Sunday after Anzac Day. Ah, bugger! We’re three days early! And we’ll be up in the Midlands meeting with one of Herself’s distant cousins on Sunday. Okay, a clear case of too much assumption and too little research, so nothing for it but to have our own small commemoration.
The cemetery is a little detached, well away even from their church, with open farm fields on two sides, and only a few low stone walls that wander off from it seem to connect it to the silent village, and by the time we’re parked in the narrow lane alongside, the sky is overcast and trying to rain - a typical April 25th back home.
Through a pair of iron gates, and it’s really tidy, clearly well cared for, grass clipped, stone wall in good repair, and it’s in two sections - the past villagers to the left, and a bare white flagpole to the right, and behind that the neat rows of regulation white service stones, each with the Australian badge emblem, and name, rank, date of death. And their ages are on most of them too, ranging from 19 to 39, but mainly they’re in their early-to-mid 20’s, young men caught up in the Great Adventure of War, half a world away from farms, towns, cities, beaches, paddocks, back streets, home and family. With bare trees dotted about, and a fine misty haze, it has a kind of timeless air, and it’d be easy to imagine a biplane wobbling in from the distance as a young Aussie larrikin buzzes us overhead.
There’s a simple stone plinth at the base of the flagpole, and mounted on it is a broken two-blade prop in stone, and it’s here we leave our pair of Remembrance Day poppies we brought with us. But then we find ourselves wishing more for them, more than just our silent tribute to – to what? Is there really some Greater Glory in dying well, for – for whatever they thought they died for? Did it matter that it all ended too soon for them? At the time would they have even vaguely felt the sense of myth that now surrounds them? And would they believe it to be a fair trade – their young lives swapped for this splash of immortality, here in this little Cotswold village of grey and honey stone? Not for one damn moment! Every one of them wanted to live long and fruitful lives and had no intention of giving that up for some myth. War is such a bloody waste.
And what is it that WE want? We tell ourselves we want to give them something, which we do, but in reality we can’t, but we also probably need to touch the legend. Which also we can’t.
We find the old, old church, and it looks like the village, all tough stone and just a little bent with age, a simple Norman style, squat, abrupt, durable, with tombstones around it from long, long ago. Inside it’s silent and only semi light, simple also, the epitome of these small and ancient Anglican parish churches, just a little musty, a whiff of Brasso and furniture polish, a few antiquities, a coldness to its atmosphere.
At the far end of the aisle, on the wall, is a framed list of the Australian Airmen who died – name, rank, where they were from, their next of kin – and in alphabetical order, not rank. It’s a tribute that clearly means something important to this village, even after 70-odd years.
We sign the visitors book, and note how few Aussies have called in over the decades. If there was ever a place that cried out for pilgrimage, it’s this one.
Back out on the highway we pull in to the quaint ‘Aerodrome Cafe’, somehow appropriately made out of corrugated iron, which you see very little of anywhere over here. There’s a small rustic porch over the door, and inside it’s still the 1920s, the floor the actual concrete slab of what was once the Officer’s Mess, about all that’s left of the original installation. But the cafe looks marvellous, a simple little counter in one corner, newspaper clippings on a side table about the ‘Anzacs Over Gloucestershire’, a painting on the wall of a Bristol biplane with the Australian flyers standing around in khaki and cavalier pose. Geez I would give quids for a copy of that.
There are settings of wooden tables and bentwood chairs, a sofa or two, a piano, a high back pew seat with carved dog’s heads, a couple of grandfather clocks, carved wooden bits of furniture that look like they’re from a church, table cloths, crockery, cruet sets. It’s all from another time, but not as if on purpose, they just haven’t changed.
And old Mrs Martin who serves us is a fitting part of the atmosphere, tells us her father bought the place from the Air Ministry in 1920, set it up as a roadside cafe, and she took it over from him. A lovely lady, she goes on chatting a while before she takes our order. She’s a dear, but the coffee and the two bacon sandwiches can only be described as careful, meagre, and she probably hasn’t changed her approach to catering since the Depression! The bread either. Possibly the worst café-snack we’ve ever had. But we just love the whole thing. They don’t make them like this any more! We find it hard to leave.
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