Shortly before the publication of my last blog post I received a phone call from Doreen and Harold Elliott's daughter, Linda, to say that Harold had died peacefully at home. He was ninety one and we had been firm friends since boyhood.
In the years that he and his younger brother, Brian, spent with my parents and I (Post 160 refers) he became an unofficial, much respected, older brother to me, too.
Never a big lad, but wiry and tough, he was a naval cadet, a fine swimmer and a formidable scrapper. Once, when we were youngsters on a family trip to the beach at Eastney, a bigger boy threw a stone that hit me on the head. Dazed and distressed, I staggered back to our family group. Harold reacted swiftly and decisively. He sought out the boy whose father later came complaining to my father: “Your boy has hit mine and made his nose bleed.” My father, a man not given to high drama, solemnly turned to Harold and said: ”Well done, son.”
It was 1930s England: another world.
Litigation was not a working class word.
After the Portsmouth blitzes we moved to Bognor Regis and Harold gained a place at Chichester High School. It was well deserved: he was the meticulous, brainy one of us.
His time at the high school and at Bognor came to an end when Harold Snr. (Uncle Tosh to me) remarried and the boys moved back to be with him in Portsmouth. We returned there shortly afterwards and lived not too far away from them. I had missed both their company and the second-hand high school education imparted to me by Harold: Thanks to him I can still quote the first few lines of P. B. Shelley's Ozymandias of Egypt and Charles Wolfe's The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna. (When, some years later, I told him that, he said: “Crikey, can you? I can't.”)
Our friendship pretty much took up where it had left off until Harold joined the army as a boy soldier. Apparently the navy, his first choice, would not allow boys as young as fourteen and a half to enlist. So he settled for the army and, no surprise, when his full time in uniform came to an end Sgt. Major H. C. Elliott, REME, was employed for many years as a civilian instructor at Borden Army Camp.
Clearly he was a successful soldier. He was also a contented husband and family man with an irrepressible sense of humour (Earwig O was never far away).
Somehow all three of us boys found the right girl to marry. Doreen was certainly the right girl for Harold and Linda a lovely daughter. Our heartfelt commiserations go to them and their entire family.
I shan't be at your funeral, Harry. Elderly diabetic lockdown precludes attendance at such gatherings. Just as well, perhaps. I can imagine your gently disapproving shake of the head as you perceived this old man sitting there with tears running down his face. Men of our ilk don't cry in public.
RIP dear friend.
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