In the 1960s, my parents were on the lookout for a gardener to tend their garden in Stanmore. After several telephone enquiries, a lanky figure, donning a beret and wearing an old suit and tie, cycled down the front path and stood his 1940s type pushbike by the side gate. This gentleman, well past retiring age, called Bill Castle, soon became a focal point for the whole family.

In no time, Bill proved to be a dedicated gardener and both he and the garden quickly seemed at one. In the winter months, as he braved the cold and damp, his nose would glow in scarlet tones from afar with a constant frozen drop suspended from its lower extremity. Yet our besuited Bill would never fail to undertake his work, as if he were carrying out orders from some higher authority. In warmer months, he would often be seen talking to the plants and flowers and furthermore knew them all by their Latin names. Ashamedly, I have to admit that I and my little sister were often in mirth at the sight of Bill stalking and chatting away astride the flower beds.

To this day I remember a conversation I had with Bill while he was relaxing with his mug of tea and sandwich. I decided to ask him about his life’s story and it was then that I discovered more than I had expected. Bill, a country lad from Elstree, was born in Watford in the twilight years of Queen Victoria’s reign. He worked on the land, jobbing mainly as a gardener, and doing anything to earn him a “tanner” or two. Towards the end of 1917, when the “last push” was called for, Bill appeared at the Watford Army recruitment office, where he and others were promptly enlisted. Each young man received a shilling and military orders. Later that same day, he recalled, they’d all spent at least one King’s penny on a pint of the local Benskins Nut Brown Ale. Soon afterwards they were all marched down Brockley Hill to the Edgware barracks, where they formed part of a regiment to be trained for action on the western front.

What Bill encountered on arrival at the front was beyond what any man or woman could ever have imagined. He described in detail the ear-splitting whistling sound of shells, the explosions, the total disfigurement of the landscape with the ground being blasted away and forming craters under the force of endless canon fire, and then the indescribable fear, panic, horror, stench and misery in the trenches with the untold suffering of the wounded; all and more were part of a picture he would never forget. One vivid image in particular he evoked, was that of the corpses of men lying stretched across the tops of trenches with their outstretched right arms still in the final position for grenade throwing.

I have since regretted never having asked Bill many more questions about his experiences. Having read at school much about that fateful war from all available accounts of the 1950s, it was clear that those historians were still highly supportive of Britain’s dutiful intervention. How could a teenager like me ever question them?

When we broached the subject of the armistice, Bill gave me in words what could only be described as a vivid canvas of the scene in hand. On a chilly, drizzly November morning in 1918, in a totally devastated no-man’s land to the east of Lille over the border in Belgium, where ceaseless bombardments tore at one’s very marrow, there suddenly descended a shocking, bewildering silence. The exhausted young men immediately glanced at each other in utter disbelief. Hostilities had ceased. Many of them cried with joy and relief that they had been spared.

Those remaining in Bill’s company picked up their few belongings and headed off along war-torn fields strewn with barbed wire, the mud-spattered remnants of fallen men, horses and wrecked hardware. They trekked for many miles along pock-marked roads to a point, where to their surprise, they had reached a tram terminus. Soon a tram, like a mirage, finally appeared. Exhausted, they climbed aboard and were finally brought back to a civilised world, which appeared so removed from the hell they had left behind. On reaching Lille, they then took a train to Calais and from there a ferry home.

I often try to imagine myself in Bill’s shoes and wonder how I would have felt returning to a foggy, cold, damp and war-bankrupted Britain, hailed back then as “a land fit for heroes” after having experienced what he and his comrades had been subjected to. Would I ever have been the same Bill again? We know only too well nowadays what befell many of those who were “fortunate” enough to escape death on the battlefields of the western front.

Private Bill Castle would at least have found great solace once more in his old profession and took immense delight in the wonders of nature through gardening. He was a regular visitor to and a very loyal part of our household for almost a decade, by which time he had reached his late seventies.

I and my father visited Bill’s home in Edgware which he shared with his older brother in the late seventies, when he was already suffering from terminal cancer. That was the last time I ever saw dear Bill Castle alive. His cremation at Watford took place on a gloriously sunny day. The wooded, floral park beside the chapel was aptly in full bloom.

My final recollection of Bill is that whenever you asked him how he was, his answer always resounded with a chirpy “mustn’t grumble!”.

By Laurence Tiger