20-05-2025
Tracing History, One Trip at a Time
Sitting in the lounge at LAX with one of those 'too small to hold' teacups and saucers, I scanned the boards every two minutes, despite the plane being an hour from departure. It's a habit I chalk up to a genetic 'gift' of OCD – one I can trace directly to my maternal grandfather. It got me thinking about what else passes down through generations. How the idea of 'home and family' blurs and stretches over time.
I'd been living in the U.S. for a decade, and although I'd flown back to England more times than I could count, this trip felt different. A big family gathering was planned – one of those multi-generational reunions where someone brings a favorite dessert and someone else brings a stack of old, yellowing photos no one's seen in years. My father, a self-declared professional war historian and part-time volunteer at Churchill's Chartwell estate, had been deep in the archives. He'd uncovered new and surprising details about both his own father and my mother's – threads of family history that were about to come alive again.
We were all converging on a rented farmhouse in Sevenoaks, Kent – not far from where I grew up. It had been too long since I'd seen many of them. Life in L.A. has a way of making the past feel far away.
At the dinner table that night, over roast lamb and wine, the talk turned – as it always does in families like mine – to stories. Old ones. We discussed how it was an interesting quirk that our Italian heritage comes, independently, from both sides of the family. Sicily on my father's side and mainland Italy on my mother's. Immigrants searching for better lives in the devastation of World War 1 and World War 2, respectively. Then someone asked the question that always brings the room to a hush: 'How exactly did Nonna Elisa meet Grandad Bert?'
It's a love story, of course. But it's also a war story. And as my father had been researching – it began in a barn soaked with blood. Bert had recounted the tale to my father years prior, and most in the family had seen Bert's war wound; a deep scarring in the left shoulder, but few knew the real story behind it. Tonight, we would hear it.
Herbert Alec Meyers – 'Bert' to the family – was born in 1922 in Limehouse, East London. He was the ninth of eleven children raised in a working-class home where money was tight and loyalty ran deep. When war came, five of the Meyers brothers put on a uniform. The father, Frank, was a German immigrant from Dortmund after WW1, brutally rounded up and interred by the British Government on the Isle of Man when war broke out for a second time. Bert enlisted in the British Army Royal Hampshire Regiment on 19th Feb 1942 and found himself shipped out with the 1/4th Battalion to North Africa in 1943. His unit fought in Tunisia, then later landed at Salerno in Italy under heavy fire.
My father continued to explain Bert's movements through Italy – the road was a long one: through the Garigliano River valley, into the hellscape of Monte Cassino (where Bert's brother George had been fighting), and finally pushing north through Tuscany toward the Gothic Line. He produced a hand drawn map – a surviving document from the war. It was a brutal march, day after day, town after town. By late September 1944, Bert'sbattalion had seen more death than rest. The allies were making progress, but the Germans were devastating adversaries determined to hold ground.
And then came the barn.
In the early hours of September 23rd 1944, his small 'band of brothers' stopped near a farmhouse to rest for the night – just a handful of men, bedding down under wooden beams, their rifles leaned nearby. The war felt distant for a moment. Respite. Bert closed his eyes and let the exhaustion overtake him.
In the pitch of night, the doors exploded open.
A German patrol had discovered them. The air lit up with machine-gun fire. Wood splintered. Screams rose and fell. Bertfelt a searing pain in his left shoulder and hit the ground. As the gunfire tore through the barn, he rolled instinctively behind a bale of hay, scanning desperately for any way out – but there was none. Just walls, timber and the sound of death. He caught glimpses of his friends lying twisted and unmoving. The air reeked of blood and dust.
Somewhere in the shadows, he heard the clipped German shouts – orders barked out over the still-whimpering remnants of the ambush. Then the silence came.
Bert realized he was the only one still alive. Should he surrender to the Germans and hope for mercy? Should he capitalize on the adrenaline now surging through his veins and launch his own frenzied attack – maybe he could use the element of surprise to get to an opening, out into the fields and run, run, run. Bert, who happened to be known for an amazing intellect for numerics and calculations, ran the odds in his head. Both of those scenarios ended in certain death.
He didn't move. He didn't breathe. His face pressed against the cold floor, he forced his muscles into stillness, willing his body to mimic death. He could hear his heartbeat pounding in his ears, terrified that the sound alone would give him away. The Germans, stepping over the bodies, assuming the job was done, fled. They feared other British soldiers were in the area and weren't willing to risk a counter-attack. That decision saved my grandfather's life.
He lay still until daylight; too afraid to break the repose that had kept him among the living, too weak to do anything else. When the rest of his company finally reached the farmhouse, they found him barely conscious, bleeding out, surrounded by the bodies of his mates. A medic worked fast. The bullet had passed clean through his shoulder, narrowly missing his heart. He was stretchered to a field hospital, then transferred to the 8th Army headquarters in Caserta to recover. When fit again, he enlisted in the 8th Army Police, Caserta, to continue his service in Italy, removed from the direct horrors of front-line conflict.
And that's where the story begins again – because that's where he met Elisa.
She was 21, local, and working with the NAAFI, the Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes. She didn't speak English. He didn't speak Italian. But something worked. They married in Caserta in 1947 and honeymooned in Sorrento. Then she left everything she knew behind and sailed to England with him, the bullet now long healed but the memory never gone.
As we sat around the table that night, my father pulled out the newspaper clipping from 1944 – a piece about the five Meyers brothers at war, along with the official record of the wounding incident held by British National Archives. Someone else had a photo of Bert in uniform marrying Elisa. We passed them around like relics. I thought of the barn again. Of the silence after the gunfire. Of the fact that if he'd so much as groaned, if the bullet trajectory was an inch closer to his heart, 90% of the people at this table would not be here. The margins of fate are much smaller than most of us like to admit.
The next morning, I woke early and walked out into the fog-thick fields behind the farmhouse. The English countryside was still. Peaceful. I thought about how far we'd come – from East London to Los Angeles, from wartime Italy to a table of great-grandkids eating sticky toffee pudding.
History lives in places, but more than that, it lives in us.
Bert passed away in 2017 at the age of 96, but the man who played dead, who survived, who came home with a wife and a story – and started everything that came next, is still very much with us in the stories that are passed down.
