If you want to get our parents animated, it is pretty easy: show mum some children, and bring up the war with dad. It couldn't be simpler.

When we were little we used to love hearing dad's war stories. but after the fiftieth telling we began to lose interest. More recently, with a better grasp of history, a deeper understanding of just why the war has such enduring importance for dad, and a curiosity about family genealogy, my interest has returned. In particular, over the last few months I have been helping to reconstruct dad's torpedoing story, using the Internet to find several new sources, all supplying pieces of a jigsaw that never quite fits. People's memories become distorted, documents contain errors, and ambiguities are a constant in any form of research. Dad has really enjoyed this process of rediscovery and the sifting through of evidence. He has been constantly asking me if I have uncovered anything new, or heard from the contacts I've made in pursuit of the story. There has been a nice congruence of interests - and we have both got something out of it.

The trouble is, or rather, the troubles are, that dad is an unreliable and defensive witness. The unreliability is something I think I can handle. If I cannot get a straight answer to a question, or I get one I strongly suspect is wrong, I simply ask the question again a few days later. Some of what dad tells me leads to new information, some of it doesn't.

It is his defensiveness that makes things difficult. I called dad today to ask some very specific questions, questions that were intended to elicit details which would tell me where dad had been during the torpedoing. Here are some examples:
  • Did you see your lifeboat being launched? (if he had answered 'yes' I would then have asked if one of the davits had failed)
  • Did the men in your lifeboat jerry rig a sail out of two oars and a tarpaulin?
  • Did some men in your lifeboat have no boots?
He gave vague answers to all these questions, and then rambled off into irrelevance, material he has already passed over dozens of times. He is pathologically incapable of simply saying 'I don't know' or 'I cannot remember'. I kept on having to ask him to stop rambling, listen to the question, stop guessing. He didn't like this. He grew defensive. 'Is this important?' he asked. 'No, of course it isn't important, dad, I'm just interested. And I thought you were, too.'

I had to give up in the end. Researching his wartime experience seems to have become just another of those activities that works for a while and then fails to deliver any benefit. I've been getting satisfaction out of this research, but I am a bit stung by the absence of dad's gratitude. It has really turned me off the whole thing.