‘The morphine syringe wouldn’t go in his frozen arm, so they had to stab it in’
by Kevin Meagher
Stoicism is often said to be the defining characteristic of the wartime generation. Their lives were enveloped in destruction and uncertainty, with death and privation ever-present. So, they just learned to get on with it.
I was reminded of that yesterday, learning of the sad death of my old friend, Sir Patrick Duffy, after a short illness. Amid the towering achievements of his life was his sheer longevity. At 105 years of age, Patrick was hitherto the oldest living former Member of Parliament.
But he was so much more than a footnote, personifying that very stoicism. He served in Fleet Air Arm during the Second World War, surviving a terrible crash at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands. His injuries were so severe that he underwent experimental plastic surgery, with regular follow-up treatments even as a centenarian.
Quite matter-of-factly he recalled medics finding him on the mountainside, unconscious in the wreckage of his plane after a day spent freezing to death. The morphine syringe wouldn’t go in his frozen arm, so they had to stab it in.
At just 23, he received the last rites twice from a priest. With the upmost stoicism he flew again and was perilously close to being sent to Singapore in 1945, mercifully accruing a long-overdue piece of good luck as the war ended. The recipient of a military pension since the 1940s, I joked with him that he was personally responsible for the state of the public finances!
Patrick never complained and stayed focused on what Bill Clinton once referred to as the future business. I assisted him with his second book, which was published in 2024 (incidentally making him the second-oldest published author in the world). His acute observations about the post-war world were accompanied with chapters on Brexit and Boris.
