A Family Narrative Lacking in Detail

April 25th 2022

This weekend I had the most brilliant conversation with my friend, E.J.

E.J. is a therapist with five siblings and she has a skill for the comic questioning of established narratives: I think it’s because she’s a therapist with five siblings. I will come back to her later because she broke something open for me that can’t be put back in its box.

During our conversation I happened to mention a strange family story that was passed on to me by my father, concerning his Uncle Joe who served in Mesopotamia in World War One. Dad always reckoned this deployment probably saved Uncle Joe from the fate of his two younger brothers, who were both killed in the trenches.

Dad told me that his mother had told him, that –  while serving in Mesopotamia- Uncle Joe was chased across the desert by a pack of hyenas and was saved by his horse.

Now, I heard my dad repeat this story on more than one occasion. To the point where I ceased to think of Great Uncle Joe without automatically adding:

“ What? Uncle Joe who was chased across the desert by a pack of hyenas and was saved by his horse?”

Curiously, Dad always told the story in the same order, and with the same wording. As if he had received it from his mother all in one line. Like a telegram, or Morse code. A discrete narrative, unencumbered by useful detail. Or context.

Possibly because of this lack of clarifying information, I had never questioned what was probably the most significant implication of this short account. That the horse acted out of some inherent altruism by saving Great Uncle Joe from being eaten by hyenas.
Indeed, a more astute reading of the narrative would have alerted me to the obvious point; which was that the horse was just doing what a horse does when faced with a pack of hyenas trampling up its arse. Legging it. And good on him I say. There wasn’t time for an ethical discussion, I don’t suppose.

So back to my friend E.J. who, when I told her the story about Great Uncle Joe, the horse, and the hyenas, immediately suggested an entirely different ending. One that I am not comfortable with.  She assumed that Uncle Joe had survived because the hyenas ate the horse. A scenario I was unprepared for, and which raises more questions not less.

So now I’m questioning the whole thing. What little of it there is. The whole notion that you can be chased ‘across the desert’ now seems far-fetched anyway. I find myself thinking – given that deserts are quite diverse environments in size, and proximity to civilization – “What? All of the desert, from one end to the other. It can only have been a tiny corner surely? ” The whole thing would have taken an awfully long time otherwise. I picture the horse, the hyenas, and Great Uncle Joe, chasing along, all in a line, like that scene at the end of a Ray Cooney farce where people run backwards and forwards across the stage. Or like Lawrence of Arabia, minus the camels, but with a horse, and some hyenas.

In the end it all just gets too ridiculous, and you must just get some work done.

While saluting a long dead relative. Who lived to tell the tale.