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Ever since I finished the memoir my father started and didn’t complete before his death - a memoir we had worked on for about ten years together - I’ve been thinking about the things he didn’t say.  For example: why did he write that on his return home from 4 years as a Prisoner of War there was a banner up saying ‘Welcome Home’?  My aunt tells me there was no such thing, simply because no one knew when he’d be home. 

It seems he walked into the house one morning, saw his father seated by the fire, said hello, and asked where his brother was.  My grandfather replied that Donald, the younger brother, had been killed in action a year earlier.  My father turned around, walked straight out of the front door, leaving it open, and didn’t come back til well past dark.  I can understand why he didn’t include that.

But what of the tunnel he dug when incarcerated?  He did time in the cooler for it.  He says it put him off tunneling for a long time because of the falls of sand and earth while digging in the dark.  But he didn’t describe and further details of what must have been a huge undertaking at the time. 

And what of his tendency, according to my mother, of waking up in the middle of the night shouting, ‘Don’t shoot!’ - what do I make of that?  Was this the tunnel that, he once said, came up directly under the sentries’ path rather than in the cornfield beyond? Or was it some other event?

Behind every story that gets told lurks the untold one, and in the tension between them lies the mystery of what it means to tell the truth. It aso shows us all, to some extent, the limits of our courage.  Some things we just don’t want to tell, even when others want to know, even when there’s no shame in any of it.