Dick was one of the nicest men I ever knew.  I used to work with him at the Coal Board.

Everyone liked him.  “All the girls like Dick” he joked.  And they did.

In those less politically-correct days when they came down from the typing pool to take shorthand he would greet each one by taking her hand and kissing her on the cheek.  Sometimes they’d sit on his knee to take dictation (no pun intended).

He meant no offence and they took none.  To them he was the uncle they never had and a gentleman.

But Dick had a fallibility.

His job was to prepare departmental reports and budgets for the Senior Team.  But no matter how much the Department Head would gee him up, deadlines came and went. Dick was unmotivatable. 

The reasons lay in his experiences thirty years earlier.

During the war Dick had been a bomber pilot raining death on Germany.  He was shot down and taken prisoner for the last three years of the war.  The German guards delighted in maltreating the terror fliegen and the population at large would have hanged them on sight.  So Dick had a hard time in his POW camp.

Randomly, prisoners were taken out into the woods and shot.  Dick didn’t know when he woke each morning if he would be lucky enough to see the day out.

His worst times, he said, were when the prisoners discovered one morning that the guards had gone.  This heralded the arrival of the Russian liberators.

According to Dick they were enthusiastic in their search for collaborators, or for Red Army deserters, or guards posing as prisoners.  Many a time he witnessed Allied POWs shot in front of him by the Russians.

“These days, every time I see the sun shining on a morning it’s a bonus” said Dick.  “Fuck the budgets”