My father was killed in action in the bloody battle of Passchendale in Belgium in October 1917, just two weeks before my first birthday. My mother and I lived first with my paternal grandparents and later with my mother's brother and sisters. My mother's eldest brother had also been killed in fighting with the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) in France. Both families had lived on small farms at Grenfell, in inland New South Wales, before the war and my father had been a share farmer. My father's parents moved to the city before my father sailed for Europe. For some years after the war times were hard and there was very little money. Nevertheless I had a happy childhood.

I have a clear memory of accompanying my mother and my paternal grandmother as a very small boy to an Anzac Day parade in which uniformed troops and returned soldiers marched past the cenotaph in Martin Place, Sydney. Three or four years after my father's death both my mother and grandmother were dressed in black. I recall that even at that early age I felt feelings of frustration rather than pride that my father had been killed in battle in a far-off land. Only recently, those feelings of frustration were rekindled by reading British butchers and blunders of World War One by Laffin (1989) which chronicles the senseless loss of the lives of the cream of British and Australian manhood in France and Belgium in the 1914–18 war. Many lives were lost as the result of the incompetence and ruthlessness of English generals such as Haig.

Bureau of Meteorology