My favourite veteran

E was past 70 when I first met him. He lived across the hall and was our landlord's father-in-law. He was a friendly, talkative old gentleman, fond of fishing off the pier at the end of the street. He was always good for a story: what stories they were and, as it happened, true.

Born in a poor seaport in the Canadian Maritimes, he first went to sea at age nine, and scratched a living first as a fisherman, then as a Great Lakes mariner, until the First World War began. He then joined the Black Watch Regiment of Canada, went to the Western Front and was one of the first to be gassed in 1915. The gassing ironically gave him his future career. The British army made E a Rolls Royce driver, and when recovered he went with Allenby's army to the Middle East. When E got back to North America, being able to drive a Rolls made him a chauffeur for many years, then a cabby until he retired.

His stories used to combine a sense of detached wonder with an elusive bitterness--something I understand better now that I'm nearer his age. A couple of years later, an accident left him with irreparable hip damage and confined him to a wheelchair and walker. Our neighbourhood was, on occasion, something tough, and I wondered aloud to him once whether that bothered him. By way of reply, he flicked at his trouser leg, drew a blade and effortlessly threw it into the woodwork across the room. He explained that he had worn the sgean dubh since he had served in the Black Watch and that no, he wasn't especially frightened of young hoodlums (The feat didn't earn him any points with his wife, though.)

He never smoked--the gas saw to that--but it was the gas that gave him emphysema. He died of his war-poisoned lungs nearly 70 years after those first heinous attacks. I still miss him. It's been a reminder of sorts that one of my daughter's best friends, through school and beyond, is a great-granddaughter of his who is too young to remember him. That's a pity, because he was one hell of a great-grandpa to have.