Will’s World: Fighting talk on the farming front lines

When a man turns 40, he goes in one of two directions with his interests.

He either turns into a passionate barbecue enthusiast and spends all his time obsessing over grilling times, charcoal types and cuts of meat, or he becomes a dedicated Second World War bore and spends all his time talking to other dedicated Second World War bores on the internet about the Second World War.

This is just the way of middle-aged men. Though for me, raised on stories of the Second World War from an early age by my grandparents, and therefore a committed Commando comic reader by the age of nine, it was only ever going to be the second of the two options.

See also: Video: Farm pickups take emotional journey to Ukraine war

We Have Ways of Making You Talk, with Al Murray and James Holland, is by far my favourite podcast, I rewatch the entire Band of Brothers series every Christmas, one of my most beloved novels is The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat.

I’m the proud owner of an original air raid siren of the era (which I occasionally use for getting my older two daughters out of bed at weekends), and my perfect day out would involve a trip to the Cabinet War Rooms in London followed by a look around HMS Belfast for the umpteenth time.

And yes, when I am on the bridge, I sit in the captain’s chair and pretend for a minute that I am charged with protecting a North Atlantic convoy from marauding U-boats in 1943.

Good question

It’s safe to say that I well and truly satisfy the criteria. So imagine the rising sense of euphoria I felt last Sunday morning when, completely out of the blue, daughter number three uttered the immortal words that I’ve been patiently waiting my entire parenting career to hear: “Daddy, how did World War Two start?”

I was already having a lovely day. The sun was shining, I’d seen the first snowdrops of the year that morning, and after a nice breakfast together, the two of us had headed off down the field to plant hawthorn quicks and a few assorted trees into some hedge gaps, which is one of my favourite things to do – “boundary therapy”, as a friend wonderfully described it to me as recently.

There’s something about working together on something like that with your children, especially if you’re an overly sentimental man like me.

It’s the continuance and connection with the landscape, I suppose, as well as the thought that maybe she’ll remember planting them with me long after I’ve gone.

Perhaps she’ll even tell her grandchildren about it one day. That’s probably just me overthinking again, but I find it comforting, so you’ll have to forgive me.

Digging for victory

As we worked steadily away together, with me making the holes and her putting in the plants and backfilling them, I told her all about the Treaty of Versailles and the reparations Germany had to pay to Britain and France that caused such hardship and resentment, fuelling the rise of national socialism.

We were planting an elder tree as I got to the invasion of Poland, the rapid fall of the rest of Europe, and the resulting evacuation from Dunkirk of the British Expeditionary Force.

By the time we’d got to the last few crab apples, I’d fully switched into Winston Churchill’s voice for the “We shall never surrender” speech, causing us to laugh uproariously together all the way home.

Next time it’ll be the Battle of Britain – I can hardly wait.