Sheffield, England (Circa 1967): My granddad looked me in the eye and said: "Son, having a sharp knife has saved my life more times than I care to remember"...
When I was a young lad, my granddad had a stroke that paralyzed him on his left-hand-side. My grandmother had passed away quite a few years earlier, so my parents turned one of our two downstairs rooms into a bedroom and granddad came to live at our house.
Most of the time granddad was confined to his bed. He spent much of his days chatting to any visitors who dropped in and watching television. This was before the age of remote controls, but we had only two or three television channels anyway, so we equipped granddad with a broom pole with which he manipulated the television's controls from his bed.
While watching television, granddad was usually to be found sharpening his large folding pocket knife. He would spit on his whetstone (a sharpening stone, also known as a water stone), which he would then place between his knees. He would use his "good" right leg to press the whetstone against his left leg and hold it in place. Then he would spend hours using his "good" right hand to sharpen the blade of his knife.
One day when I was around ten years old, I was in our back garden making a rope-ladder with Jeremy Goodman, my best friend who lived a few houses down the road. We needed something to cut the rope – my parents were out running errands – so I went to see granddad and asked if I could borrow his knife.
Without asking any questions (something I always appreciated about granddad), he reached over to his bedside table, picked up the knife in his right hand, opened it with his teeth, and handed it to me haft-first. As I left the room, he said: "Be careful son, that's a sharp knife."
When I rejoined Jeremy, he held the rope while I cut it. The knife slid through the rope as though it was butter. My dad had shown me how to test the sharpness of a blade by pulling it gently backwards across my thumb; I did so and ended up with a series of little cuts – granddad's knife was as sharp as a razor!
After Jeremy and I had finished making our rope ladder, I took the pocket knife back to granddad and asked: "Granddad, why do you keep your knife so sharp?" He looked me directly in the eye and replied: "Son, having a sharp knife has saved my life more times than I care to remember."
I can still recall the far-away look granddad had as he spoke to me; it was as though he wasn't looking at our dining room (now acting as his bedroom), but was instead seeing scenes from other times and places.
At that time I knew that granddad had served in the Royal Navy for most of his life. What I didn’t know (or at least, I didn't fully appreciate) was that he'd been on a number of ships that had been sunk underneath him. For example, he was a Leading Seaman and head of "A" Gun Turret on HMS Prince of Wales, which was the flagship of the Eastern Fleet when she was attacked and sunk by 86 Japanese bombers and torpedo bombers on 25 October 1941.
Just thinking of the look in granddad's eye still sends a little shiver down my spine to this day. I can only imagine the noise and confusion there would be as a big ship slid beneath the waves; I can also only imagine stray ropes wrapping around one's body and legs, threatening to drag you down with the ship; and reaching for your trusty knife, cutting yourself free, and bobbing back up to the surface to draw a lungful of air.
I'm thankful I haven't had the experiences and seen the things my granddad saw.
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