We probably all remember, some of us with more clarity than others, the learning of the alphabet, those 26 letters that make up the English Alphabet? The word itself is a compound of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta. It originated in the C7th to write Old English from Latin script. All the characters of the English alphabet are displayed in the pangram “The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog.” There are many other alphabets, some 100 globally, but 99% of the world’s pure alphabets come from just nine, Latin, Chinese characters, Arabic, Devanagari (Hindi, Nepali and Sanskrit), Bengali, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Greek and Japanese.

“As easy as your ABC” became synonymous for something that was easy to do. And you might be right in thinking I only got as far as the letter C …… despite my surname being almost at the end of the alphabet. And that in itself can produce a sense of unfairness, always at the end, the last on any distribution list or handout. I could easily have developed a little chip on a shoulder about this and hope that at some stage in the future someone will decide to start something with Z!

So …. C…. sounding like ‘see’ or ‘sea’ ……

I seem to be in the centre of the letter C. My wife was christened Celina, and her brother Carlos. The parents were Carlos and Cecilia. Carlos junior married a Camilla and Celina’s first husband was called Chris. You might by now be thinking how come she’s chosen me, with a Christian name beginning with R. Ah! I know. Because my middle name is Corbett, through my grandmother’s father Richard Sydney Corbett being born in Recife Brazil and his father migrating to Brazil in 1830 from Lancashire.

The idea for these scribbles began to germinate during a catch-up call with another C, a Crichton. You may think the only Crichton you’ve heard of is that one in the 1957 film The Admirable Crichton about an affluent family who get shipwrecked and come to rely on their butler, Crichton. It starred Kenneth More and Diane Cilento and it’s so long ago that not many people alive will have remembered it. My ‘Crichton’ was born a week after me and I met him for the first time in September 1965 when we joined Intake 39 Burma Company at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Two years later, on commissioning, we went our separate ways, he into the Royal Gloucester Regiment (Note 1) and me into the Royal Regiment of Artillery. Our military paths never crossed but I touched base when a fellow Gloucester officer serving as the Defence Attache in Athens, Peter Saunders, was murdered in 2000. At Sandhurst we learned another alphabet ……

During our time at Sandhurst we both volunteered to take the Basic Parachuting Course, two jumps from a balloon (see PC 28 Balloons, Bloating and … ) and a number, including a night jump, from an aeroplane. The last was onto Hankley Common near Godalming, Surrey for a summer Teddy Bear’s Picnic. Although qualified as a Military Parachutist and entitled to wear the badge, irreverently known as the ‘light bulb’, we hadn’t taken part in the Parachute Regiment’s P Company selection so were no way able to wear the coveted red beret!

I mention this because Crichton’s eldest son John followed his father into an infantry regiment and has completed three tours in Afghanistan and two in Iraq. Apparently his chest is covered in medals, whereas in our time in the army the only campaign medals awarded were for service in Northern Ireland (see PCs 196, 197 & 198 September 2020) and the Falklands War in 1982. By comparison with John’s, my uniform was a little bare; we just did what came up and, depending on your viewpoint, were in the wrong place at the wrong time or the right place at the right time!

‘C’ was the beginning of the title (Note 2) of a heart-rending account of journalist and broadcaster John Diamond’s ultimately futile battle with oral and throat cancer (Note 3), which had been diagnosed in 1997. He was married to Nigella nee Lawson with whom he had two children, Cossima and Bruno, and died in March 2001 shortly before his 44^th birthday. Nigella is now a well-known food writer and television cook; she was married to Charles (another C!) Saatchi from 2003 to 2013.

John and Nigella Diamond

Crichton’s first wife, with whom he had spent many decades, died in 2019 …… of cancer. So the letter C again!

So you can finish with a grin or a laugh, read this: “A man was walking along a street when he heard a crowd in the garden of a building on the other side of a fence. As he got closer he determined they were chanting: ‘thirteen’, thirteen’, ‘thirteen’ over and over and over again. Being a very curious individual, he wondered why they were doing this and, seeing a little hole in the wooden fence at about his height, stopped and put his eye to it. He recoiled as someone stuck a stick through the hole just missing his iris. The chanting continued: ‘fourteen’, ‘fourteen’, ‘fourteen’ ….”

Richard 1^st December 2023

Hove

www.postcardscribbles.co.uk

Note 1. The Gloucestershire Regiment (The Glosters) existed as an infantry regiment from 1881 to 1994. At its peak it consisted of 18 battalions but after WW2 ended it was reduced to one single battalion of some 660 men. That unit covered itself in glory during the Battle of the Imjin River in 1951 during The Korean War. The Glosters were part of the four-infantry battalion 29^th Brigade, some 2500 men, ordered to hold the south side of the river against 27,000 Chinese soldiers. For three successive nights they repelled numerous Chinese attacks, eventually withdrawing to Hill 235 where their stand enabled other parts of the United Nations force to conduct an orderly retreat. Just 63 men managed to get off the hill, subsequently christened Gloster Hill; 56 soldiers had been killed and 522 taken prisoner.  

Note 2 The full title was “C: Because Cowards get Cancer Too”

Note 3 A cousin of mine died of throat cancer aged 55. Awful!