Cod Almighty | Diary

Everybody's got to learn sometime

20 February 2025

When you suddenly get laid low with illness the world shrinks dramatically. Fortunately your Guest Diarist's bed is adjacent to a window and so I can watch the weather and glance at the passersby. There is a bug going round, and like Bowie's brand new dance, we don't know its name. But it is a proper poleaxer. For three days I never even watched the news or looked up Town on that Twitter, but my timing was good and nothing much is happening except the usual political posturing and outraged hot air. But this mild morning has me fantasising about getting early potatoes in under fleece - a target is set for next week. Deo Volente.

So when I have been drifting about the mind goes backwards and I have gone back to the puzzled relationship my Dad and my maternal Grandad had with Grimsby Town. My Dad's Dad died in the war so I never knew him - a heart attack rather than a bomb or a bullet. But trying to run a farm on your own with all the help sent away to fight probably accelerated his demise. Just like he would never talk about the war, I could rarely get my Dad to open up about the football. But I know he went to games in the mid-late thirties and that he idolised George Tweedy and Jackie Bestall.

But so many questions unanswered and with him dead 20 years they will never get answered. Did he go on his own? Did he go on the bus? Which stand? Probably the boys enclosure. I think the war stopped it all. No-one came the other side of that undamaged. When he was called back from Italy in 1943 because in the space of 12 months his Mum and Dad had died, and his elder sister had succumbed to TB, the world must have seemed desperately sad and grim. I think the football just got lost amidst everything else going on. And once it was gone, shut away with all those awful memories, the key to it was lost.

My other Grandad, dead for 50 years, never mentioned Town to me as a boy. It was only by accident I discovered that he had attended the 1939 FA Cup semi-final. Apparently he travelled by motorbike and sidecar and the journey took six hours each way. His war was the first war, he ran away from the farm where he worked at 14, lied about his age, and enlisted. The farmer didn't feed him properly, he thought the army would. Fortunately a kindly officer recognised his plight and got him sent to some island near India where he learned to operate a Blackstone engine. That gave him a career. When the second war came he took in evacuees, headed the town's fire service, rallied round. But after the war ended he also never went to a Town game again. Rebuilding the country after the war, raising a family, helping the community, it seems there was no time for football anymore.

So wars kill and maim people. I think we knew that. But the collateral damage is untold. Losing the stiff upper lip attitude, you would think nowadays we would be so much better at helping people deal with 'stuff'. But then again last week I found a bloke in his fifties bivouacing down the allotments. Talking to him I gleaned he had a bad time in Afghanistan and lived outside to avoid people. I gave him a frying pan, some oil and a dozen eggs. I know. As I left he thanked me and said I would have made a great sapper. I managed to get away before he saw the tears.

The world needs no more wars, or even rumours of war. Let the people find a bit of happiness so they can at least enjoy the football. See yer.