Great-Uncle Harry
A Tale of War and Empire
Michael Palin
Having read it
★★★★★
A good read, written with love, good research (and helpful assistance) and curiosity and interest of a member of the Palin family that unfortunately reached an untimely demise in the First World War.
Despite that end, the narrative is good and even the suppositions alongside Harry’s diary entries over the years and known happenings in the world at various points help paint an interesting picture with considerate final words.
H. W. B. Palin had lived his life, a little at his family’s edges and somewhat as a drifter and even in different countries across the world from his twenties onward and, as the author writes, was:
[a] complex mix of faults and flaws and talents and virtues. He would, I’m pretty sure, have had no time for the patriotic cliché. He wouldn’t want to have been summed up. Harry was a work in progress, still searching for lasting happiness when he died.
A good passage
The fact that Healy kept Harry on at Wilderness Farm [New Zealand] for the next three years [during Harry’s late twenties] shows that the young immigrant was not shy when it came to hard work. But I think there may have been another reason why Harry and his employer were compatible. Ted Healy was Irish. Harry was half Irish. His mother may have suppressed her Irish-ness, exchanging it for the advancement her English connections brought her, but deep down, in the dark hours, memories of her own parents and their terrible suffering must have constantly edged into her consciousness. And though she had all the benefits of a loving and supportive English family, nothing could erase the awareness that it was Irish genes that had created her and English policy that had orphaned her. I can’t help thinking that this unresolved indignation found an outlet in Harry, making him less prepared to accept the status quo than his siblings; more rebellious; more impulsive. He might have inherited some of the formal, buttoned-up traits of his English father, but he had certainly also imbibed the more freewheeling, less conformist characteristics of his Irish ancestry.
And that, I suspect, helped bring him and Ted Healy close together. After many years of bridling at what the British way of life expected of him, Harry had found a place in a country far away that enabled him to be him-self, to do the work he wanted and be judged by those he respected. Ted and Mary Healy were his new Irish parents.
A second good passage
On the 29th he [Harry] recorded, ‘Rumours that we have got to stay on in trenches over Sunday, then going to the Somme to reinforce the Australians.’ As usual with Harry, there is no editorialising here, no hint of apprehension. He would have had some inkling from the papers and from gossip passed up the line just what a transfer to the Somme would mean, but either the full extent of the disaster was still being successfully concealed, or he was exhibiting extraordinary sangfroid. I suspect it was more the former than the latter: further evidence that those fighting a war are the last to know exactly what or why. Perhaps if they did, they might start questioning whether they should be fighting at all.
As it was, he followed the news of a possible Somme posting with a positive entry: ‘Glorious summer’s day. Too good for the trenches.’