My enthusiasm for brocantes - flea markets - has made my face familiar among vendors, so I wasn't surprised one of them called out to me at a market this weekend.
"Ah, l'Australien. I 'ave something for you."
For a moment, I couldn't make out the object he thrust under my nose. It looked like a toasting fork.
I studied it more closely.
It was a toasting fork - but one that had begun life as something else. There was a knob and loop of brass at one end, and at the other a six-tined fork twisted out of wire. Woven into it was a badge I recognised as that of the Australian forces that fought with Britain and the Allies during World War I.
I could imagine some bored "digger", as Australian soldiers were known, rescuing a brass andiron from a ruined cottage and using it to fashion this gift for the folks back home. Or perhaps just to warm up the rations with which he was issued.
War has been described as long stretches of boredom interrupted by periods of unbelievable danger. "Trench art" helped keep mind and hands busy in the interval. It came in many forms; shell casings, embossed and polished, became vases, scraps of shrapnel made badges or pins, and men even risked death to retrieve the parachutes that slowed the descent of flares. Sent back home, the silk of one made a pair of knickers, two a blouse.
I bought the fork, of course. My grandfather Archie was one of those "diggers", though not clever enough to create something like this. In fact, as I found researching a book about Paris during the Great War and his part in it, he never even got to the trenches, being invalided out before he fired a shot. In shipping him off to France, nobody noticed he had varicose veins. By the time they'd been removed in a British hospital, the war was over
Grandfather Archie and wife Stella. (He looks like he would rather be anywhere else.)
The AEF badge turned up in stranger places than on toasting forks. Before being sent into action, new recruits, including Archie, were sent to a camp at Codford on Salisbury Plain to learn how to soldier. On the hill behind the camp, an area the size of a football field has been turned into a monument to that experience. Patches of grass and earth were cleared off the underlying chalk to create a kind of picture.
Such carvings cropped up all over southern Britain. Locals had been making them since the Stone Age. Horses were a popular subject, though the most famous is the Cerne Abbas Giant, a huge man, club in hand, striding across a hillside. According to local custom, even the least fertile woman will conceive if she passes the night within one of his enormous testicles.
The Codford one, however, depicted the rising sun of the Australian army badge.
“They called it Misery Hill," a local told me. "Working on it was a punishment. Defaulters were sentenced to dig there. There were so many brown beer bottles around the camp that they filled the trenches with them, bottom uppermost. When the sun hit, the badge looked like it was made of bronze."
A monument made of beer! Now that's something any red-blooded Australian could really put his back into.
Mine father went first, ahed of the soldiers, with a handheld device which alerted him to hidden mines. Although in New Guinea it was still a nerve wracking job. He also carved and embossed napkin holders out of aluminium and crafted a sailboat, complete with sail, in the style of the islanders.