The Brass Iron

The thing in the ground

I was eleven, which is the age when being handed a spade feels like a promotion. My grandparents, Percy and Lily, ran the Sutton Reading Room on the outskirts of Hull… a snooker hall with a bowling green attached, the sort of place where the loudest sound on a summer afternoon was the soft knock of woods against the jack and somebody’s uncle disputing the measurement. I spent a good deal of my childhood pottering about there, being useful in the way small boys are useful, which is to say enthusiastically and with a fairly high breakage rate.

On this particular day I’d been given the job of working the ground around the flag post. I don’t remember who decided that patch of earth needed turning… possibly nobody, and I’d simply been handed a spade to keep me out from under the snooker tables. I do remember the dig, though. I remember the jolt up both arms when the blade hit something that wasn’t a stone, and that odd little moment where your body knows something before your head has caught up.

It was an iron. A small brass iron, the old kind, or a child’s version of the old kind… I’ve never been entirely sure which, and I’ve decided I don’t want to be. It sat in an eleven-year-old’s palm with room to spare, caked in Yorkshire clay, and it felt like treasure, because at eleven anything that comes out of the ground is treasure until an adult tells you otherwise.

I still have it. More than half a century, a career in uniform, more house moves than I care to count and, eventually, a cave in rural Spain later, it is one of the very few objects that has made every journey with me. I’ve lost far more valuable things along the way and barely noticed. So why that, of all things? It took me years to admit the answer, and the answer isn’t really the iron. It’s who I ran to show it to.

Percy and Lily

Percy and I were close in that unspoken way grandfathers and grandsons sometimes manage, where very little gets said and absolutely nothing needs to be. Lily and he ran that place between them, the snooker hall and the green, and to a boy it seemed like the most natural kingdom in the world: chalk dust, the smell of cut grass, men in their Sunday best taking a game of bowls far more seriously than anyone takes anything now.

I’d love to give you a dramatic anecdote that proves how kind Percy was, some single moment that sums him up. I can’t, and I’ve come to think that’s the point. Kindness that needs an anecdote to prove it is usually a performance. His was the background hum of the whole place, the thing you only notice when it stops. He was, quite simply, the softest and gentlest man I have ever known, and I’ve known a great many men, in a great many uniforms, in a great many places where softness was not considered a career asset.

I don’t remember exactly what he said when I came running with that iron. What I remember is that he made it feel like it mattered. He didn’t brush it off, didn’t tell me it was junk, didn’t send me back to the digging. For a few minutes, a lump of brass from under a flag post was the most important thing on the premises, because it was important to me. At eleven, that’s the whole of love in one gesture, and I’m not sure it gets much more complicated at sixty-six.

Two wars and a medal

Here’s the bit that still stops me. That gentle man by the bowling green was a veteran of both world wars. In the first, in the trenches, he went out under a hail of fire and brought his sergeant back, and he was decorated for it. Then, a generation later, he found himself in the second one as well… a man who had already seen exactly what war does to bodies and minds, back in it again.

I’ve read a fair few citations and official reports in my time, and written more than my share of the dry institutional kind. I know how these things get recorded. The paperwork captures the act: the date, the place, the conduct, the outcome. It does not capture the twenty-odd seconds before he moved, or what he saw on the way out, or what he carried back in his head along with the sergeant. It certainly doesn’t capture the man who, decades later, would stop what he was doing to admire a muddy brass iron because his grandson was excited about it.

The temptation, writing this, is to tie it up neatly. To say his softness was because of the war, that he’d seen the worst of people and chose gentleness as a kind of quiet defiance. Maybe that’s true. But I’m wary of it, because plenty of men came home harder, and some never really came home at all, not on the inside. I don’t know which way the scales tipped for Percy, or what it cost him to be the man I knew. I never asked. At eleven you don’t think to, and by the time you’re old enough to know the right questions, the person who could answer them has usually gone.

My father, and the arithmetic of absence

My father was cut from much the same cloth. He rose to Warrant Officer Class 1 in the Royal Signals, which, for anyone who hasn’t served, is the rank where you’re the person the officers quietly turn to when they’d like to know what’s actually going on. He faced warfare in Sudan, and he was away from home in that for five years.

Five years. Write that number down and sit with it for a moment. Five Christmases, five sets of birthdays, five summers of somebody else mowing the lawn and fixing the leaking tap and answering the door to bad news or no news at all. History books will give you the campaign, the strategic context, the political outcome, and very occasionally a casualty figure. What they never give you is the arithmetic of absence, the thousands of small domestic moments that simply didn’t happen, or happened with an empty chair in them.

And somebody always waits. That’s the part the heroic version leaves out. Behind every man in a photograph squinting into foreign sun, there’s a kitchen somewhere with a letter on the table, read so often the folds have gone soft. I grew up in a service family, in Colchester and Germany and Norway, and I can tell you that the uniform is never worn by one person alone. The whole household wears it, whether they signed up or not.

There’s a grim little postscript, too. Sudan, the same country that took five years of my father, has spent the last few years tearing itself apart again. Same deserts, new names, new families waiting. I wonder how many people scrolling past it know that, or would feel anything if they did.

Every uniform has a kitchen behind it

Let me be clear, before anyone mistakes this for a lament. I’m proud of my military background. I’m proud of Percy, proud of my father, and proud of my own years in the RAF Police. I don’t think pride and honesty are enemies, although our culture increasingly seems to want you to pick one and wave a flag for it.

But service, as anyone who has done it will tell you, is mostly not the bit they film. It’s not the slow-motion charge or the stirring music. It’s the phone call home that gets cut off. It’s the birthday you hear about a week later. It’s the strange, tilted feeling of walking back into your own house and realising life carried on without you, and that the people you love have quietly learned to manage in your absence, which is both exactly what you wanted and the loneliest thing in the world.

The heroes, in other words, had real lives. They had wives who ran the house and mothers who couldn’t sleep, children who grew up recognising a face from photographs, mates they laughed with and lost, small grudges, favourite chairs, bad jokes they told every Christmas. They had grandsons who would one day dig things up and come running. Strip all of that away and what you’re left with isn’t a hero at all. It’s a statue, and statues are very convenient, because they don’t ask anything of you.

War, now showing on a screen near you

Which brings me to the uncomfortable bit. I think, generally though not exclusively, we’ve become dissociated from the reality of war. Not ignorant of it… we’ve never had more access to it. We’re dissociated from it, which is a different and in some ways worse condition.

Think about how Ukraine arrives in most people’s lives. A map with coloured patches that shift a few millimetres. A casualty estimate that has already been rounded to the nearest thousand by the time it reaches you. Drone footage, sometimes literally set to music, of tiny figures in a field that the algorithm has decided is content. A pundit explaining what it all means for energy prices. Then a thumb moves, and it’s someone’s holiday in Crete, and the brain files the whole thing under background noise along with the weather and the football.

What almost never arrives is the man in that field as a person. The fact that he has a mother who rings him every evening he’s reachable, a daughter who has started drawing him from memory, a sergeant he’d go back out for. Somewhere there’s a kitchen in Kharkiv or Kursk or Khartoum with a letter on the table, and it looks exactly like the kitchens of 1917 and 1942 and every year since. War hasn’t changed nearly as much as our way of not looking at it has.

In fairness, some of that distance is self-protection. Nobody can carry the grief of every conflict on earth and still get the shopping in, and I’m not pretending I do. But there’s a difference between not being able to carry it and choosing not to know it exists. I think a lot of people, if they’re honest, have made that second choice. The reality is available. They just don’t actually want it, because the reality would ask something of them, even if it’s only to feel something for a stranger for a full minute before the next video starts.

And we have, as a society, become rather good at outsourcing that minute. We have Remembrance Sunday for it, and poppies, and well-lit statues, and I’m not knocking any of them. But I do sometimes wonder whether we’ve turned remembrance into an annual appointment precisely so we don’t have to do it the rest of the year. Two minutes of silence in November, and the other fifty-one weeks on mute.

The iron on the shelf

The brass iron sits on a shelf in my cave now, a long way from Hull, still faintly stubborn with old clay in its seams. I’ve looked at it thousands of times without really seeing it, the way you stop seeing anything you love. It was only while thinking about this piece that something occurred to me which, frankly, ought to have occurred to me about fifty years ago.

Of all the things to pull out of the ground beside a flag post, it was an iron. Not a cap badge, not a shell casing, not some suitably martial relic for a boy from a military family. An iron. The most domestic object imaginable. The thing somebody uses, every week, to press the shirts of the people they love so they look decent when they go out into the world. The flag above, all ceremony and symbolism, and right beneath it, buried and forgotten, the ordinary private life that the flag was supposedly flying for.

I don’t know how it got there. I don’t know whose it was, or whether Percy knew, or whether he smiled at me that day because he saw in it what I’m only seeing now. I never asked him, and I can’t ask him now, and I’ve stopped pretending that’s a tidy sort of grief. It isn’t. It’s one more question I left too late, sitting on a shelf in a cave, catching the light.

So here’s all I’ll ask of you, and it’s not much. Next time the war comes through your screen, wherever it is, pause long enough to imagine the iron. The kitchen. The letter. The grandson who hasn’t been born yet, who’ll one day dig something up and come running to show the softest man he knows. If you can’t manage that, fair enough. But at least be honest that you’ve chosen not to.

Until Next Time