While my great-uncle Raymond eventually grew up to be a functional adult, no one who actually knew him would say that I’m overstating it if I say that as a kid, he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. This was due partly to the fact that he had been extremely sheltered as a child because he was the only boy in a family that already counted two very strong-willed girls, partly because we can’t all win the common sense lottery.
When the Second World War broke out, he must have been ten or twelve. His parents — my maternal great-grandparents — generally managed to stay out of trouble throughout the German occupation, and to keep him out of trouble too, which was no small feat.
One thing you have to know about their hometown (a small town in Belgium with not much to show for itself besides an average record of coal mining and accidentally being the birthplace of a locally-famous author) is that it was rather inconveniently located next to a landing strip that had captured the attention of both enemies and allies. It was of no particular strategic importance, but at least it was a place where you could refuel a plane and perhaps eat a sandwich between attacks and whatnot. The German Luftwaffe, for reasons to which I’m not privy, decided to make it its main base in the region, despite the fact that the runway was mainly grass, which isn’t very convenient to operate large aircrafts such as bombers, but that didn’t seem to trouble them too much.
Fast forward a couple of years, and the war finally drew to an end, as wars tend to do. Everyone could cautiously breathe a little sigh of relief upon learning that the allies had landed and that it would soon be over, including, I assume, my great-grandparents who must have been particularly thrilled that their only son hadn’t done anything worthy of the firing squad one way or another.
The Germans packed it up to go home in a bit of a hurry, and they had to leave a lot of their non-essential material behind. I was told that normally, the procedure there would have been to render said material unusable so that it wouldn’t just become a resource for the enemy, but there must have been a bit of a miscommunication on that front since not everything was disabled.
Some kids, including Raymond, ran to the landing strip to witness the departure of the Luftwaffe and maybe cheer a little. They had been there for a while when something on the side of the maintenance hangar caught the little bugger’s eye. “Brilliant!”, he thought. He ran down the slope and to the hangar, where he took a moment to consider how lucky he was.
The amphibious tractor had not been disabled. Even better: it still had some fuel in its tank and the engine started on the first try. Overjoyed with his discovery, Raymond took it upon himself to drive it home as a reparation for the deprivations his family had endured during the war. And also because it looked rad.
He waved at his friends and drove the amphibious vehicle through the small streets, past the station, past the church, and onto the main street. The whole endeavour must have taken him about ten minutes, during which the inhabitants of the town, who had learned to mind their own business, didn’t do anything to stop him, though two of them later told Raymond’s mother that had seen him negotiate a difficult turn like a professional driver, which didn’t help his case.
His house was in sight. Raymond imagined how excited his sisters would be upon seeing him return with such a valuable war prize. But then there were a few awkward noises, and all of a sudden, no noise at all. The tank was empty, and the vehicle wouldn’t start, no matter how many levers he would pull. “Too bad”, he thought, “it would have been really nice.” He walked the last couple of hundred yards home with his hands in his pockets, kicking rocks and sulking a little.
“What have you been up to?” his mother asked.
“Nothing much. Went to the airfield to watch the Germans go,” he replied.
“Are they gone now?” she asked again.
“Yeah, most of them anyway,” he said.
“You shouldn’t have gone there, God knows what they’ll do now that they…” but Raymond never heard the rest of that sentence; he had already run to the yard to check on the dogs.
“You wouldn’t believe what Marie-Louise just told me,” said Raymond’s father to his mother later that night. “She said she thought she’d seen Raymond driving a German tank across town earlier today.”
“She’s really losing her marbles this time, bless her soul,” replied Raymond’s mother.
But the more she thought about it, the more plausible the story sounded. Her suspicions were confirmed by everyone she met the next day, and by the rather conspicuous presence of the large German amphibious vehicle that was parked in the middle of the street by the old bakery.
Raymond was grounded until the Americans arrived in town, and even then, he was only released after promising that under no circumstances was he to steal, appropriate, pilfer, loot, or otherwise borrow military vehicles. He mostly stuck to his promise for the rest of his life.