Harry Patch RIP

It seems like quite a lot to ask a one hundred and eleven year old man to carry. Harry Patch's death as the last surviving British World War One serviceman, the last direct link with the horrors of Passchendale, has set off a train of sombre reflection on the essential futility of all wars. As a Victorian, Harry was seemingly being asked to pack a full kitbag of nostalgic connections with a simpler, gentler, sweeter age. As the last Tommy, he was being asked to hump around a universal disquiet with senseless killing. He appeared to carry his burden lightly, describing war as "organised murder" and televised Remembrance Day ceremonies as "show business".

His obituaries have, sensibly, lacked sentimentality. Rather they have chosen to reflect his West Country common sense, the plumber's practicality, the gritty salt of the common man. At 111 his age alone with its three century spanning, prime, Nelsonic and Bilbo Bagginsy overtones, is cause for amazed reflection and deep respect. His quiet dignity in a wheelchair, his rasping vowels lingering on the radio, his uncompromising faith in family and hard work are all that's needed to mark the passing of a remarkable life.

Harry Patch RIP.

An Italian Chapel

The Orkney Islands are full of surprises. One of the first is that the inhabitants don't really regard them as islands at all in much the same way that Venetians have long ceased to think of themselves as marooned on a collection of islands in a muddy lagoon.

Kirkwall, the capital of Orkney, is situated on a narrow, natural land bridge connecting the two halves of what is known as 'the mainland'. It's difficult to know exactly where this mainland ends as a string of smaller islands stretching away to the south-east were linked up by causeway during World War Two to help re-inforce the wartime naval base of Scapa Flow. From the air they look like a giant island kebab. This system of causeways was named the Churchill Barriers and the work on them was largely completed by Italian prisoners-of-war who were interned on the Orkneys (or 'in Orkney' as they would have learned to say) for much of the war.

Today the most poignant reminder of their time of incarceration, exile and hard labour is the small chapel on Lamb Holm which overlooks the Barriers from the site of their camp. The story goes that one of the POW's, the indomitable Domenico Chiocchetti, persuaded the camp commander to allow the prisoners to spend their spare time converting a pair of Nissen huts into a chapel. It must have been a relatively easy call for the mild mannered, Italian-speaking Major T.P. Buckland who then watched with growing admiration and wry amusement as Chiocchetti wrangled and wheedled every ounce of spare concrete and ingenuity out of his 550 fellow inmates and proceded to create a minor masterpiece. The spirit of da Vinci and Michelangelo captured in plasterboard, painted concrete and painstakingly re-worked barbed wire.

The effect today is of walking into a school theatre set skilfully knocked up by the woodwork teacher, lovingly decorated by the art master and cunningly dressed by a devoted parent drawing on a basket of old props. Indeed Signor Chiocchetti had staged full-scale operatic productions featuring cardboard gondolas and canvas and chicken wire palazzos before he turned the force of his creative genius to the construction of the chapel.

Behind the altar Chiocchetti painted a fresco of the Madonna and Child copied faithfully from a post card sent by his mother in Moena that he carried with him throughout the war. It is a most serenely beautiful piece.



At the end of the war, Ccioccetti remained in Orkney to complete his legacy and then returned in 1960 with members of his extended family and old comrades to re-consecrate his place of wartime worship. It's easy to picture him fussing over the positioning of the carved wooden stations of the cross or polishing the wrought iron railings of the rood screen one last time.

Before he left the mainland, he wrote an open letter to the people of Orkney. In it, he said "The chapel is yours, for you to love and preserve. I take with me to Italy the remembrance of your kindness and wonderful hospitality. I shall remember always, and my children shall learn from me to love you." It is difficult to craft a more resounding statement of reconciliation between peoples that that.

Perhaps every man is an island after all.

gr8

gr8 is one of those handy text abbreviations that saves you two keystrokes and a couple minimiligigs or whatever of memory - easy enough to grasp with the same mentality that we used to approach penny-a-word telegrams (see Dog Sense in an earlier posting.) I had reason to use this little shorthand text recently while waiting for the ferry from Gills Bay to St Margaret's Hope, Orkney.

In 1496, James IV of Scotland - a keen harbour and ship builder - sent for a Dutch ship's captain to establish a new ferry service across the Pentland Firth from the northern tip of mainland Scotland to the newly enthralled islands of the ancient Norse domain of Orkney. He was particularly keen on getting a Dutch mariner to run this new service because of their reputation for fine seamanship, sharp business sense and dogged determination. And who better in Holland to provide this maritime entrepreneurship than the de Groot brothers - or so James IV's envoys reported after some heavy negotiations in an Amsterdam alehouse.

And so the de Groots ran the royal ferry to and from the Orkneys for over two hundred years charging a groat a ride for most of that time and becoming well established local landowners into the bargain. The head of the family in the early 1500's was Jan de Groot who had seven sons all competing for a slice of the by now lucrative family business transporting dried fish, whisky, wool, hides and beef from this northerly natural pantry to points south. At one annual de Groot family dinner, held every year to commemorate winning the royal contract, a nasty quarrel broke out over the seating plans with each of the de Groot boys demanding equal access to their father's favours. The salty old mariner sent them all packing and told them to come back to next year's AGM feast and he'd have a solution to their dispute.

Jan spent the intervening year devising a solution that was ingenious, entirely practical, wholly egalitarian and yet loaded with low cunning - James IV would have expected nothing less from his Dutch CEO. When the brothers arrived armed with their reports of another year's successful trading, they found that the old man had spent his time constructing a new octagonal house complete with eight separate entrance doors and an eight-sided board room table. The sons took their seats suitably impressed and mollified - Jan, Oh Gr8 one of them muttered - or John O'Groats as it has come down to us over the years.