Treat those trollies right!

Especially if you live in my neighbourhood.

This story probably starts on the night of the 4/5 August 1916 when my grandfather was killed at Poziers, one of 260 odd of the 26th Bn killed that night. An event that was to warrant less than a page in the unit's war diary!

This family event led to a lot of reading about WW1, John Harris's 'Covenant with Death' was the first to describe the futility of it all, then 'Good Bye to All That' by Robert Graves, and later Sassoon and Owen caught my attention.

A visit to France and a trip to the grave of my grandfather at Serre Rd Nr 2 cemetery shattered me. Had to walk some miles from the rail station to the grave, it went past the Newfoundland memorial. I could not cope with the enormity of the deaths that the war caused.

Suddenly John McCrae's poem took on a whole new meaning;

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

So now that it is approaching another 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month, I do my bit for the local Returned Servicemens Club and sell poppies for a donation at the local shops.

And it was there I met Carlos, mid fifties I guess, a short stocky bloke and as tough as nails. He could wheel 20 shopping trollies over the asphalt and into the shopping centre doors with a finesse that would make even ballet dancers jealous.

That would have been the end of the story had not that night my wife wanted cat meat, so went for a walk to the local shops, it's a 5K round trip and takes me about an hour. On the way back I meet Carlos some distance from the shops collecting recalcitrant trolleys, so I stopped for a bit of a yarn.

Got his lifes history and then he wandered into the topic of "The shocking way some people treat trollies". He was almost emotional about it.

Now most people who wish to sybolically shoot someone would, with a gutteral click, give a flick of the hand with thumb erect and the index finger pointing at the victim. Not Carlos, he adopted a crouched position and symbolically held a machine gun, and judging by the noise he made, it was a symbolic M60!

So as I said at the start if you are around my way, treat your trollies with respect!