Her determination won a court ruling that army negligence led to the death of her son in BasraAfter Rose Gentle's soldier son
Gordon died in Iraq, a gift was left anonymously on her doorstep. It was an oil painting of Gordon, resplendent in his Royal Highland Fusiliers army uniform, copied from a photograph. A kind gift. For one of the strange things about bereavement is how quickly you lose certainty about the face that in life was so loved and so familiar. The exact shade of the eyes. The curve of the cheek or the set of the jaw. A painting, a photograph… it is all that is left, the symbolic remnants of a life.
Gordon Gentle was an ordinary teenager. But in death, the 6ft 2in boy soldier came to represent the tragedy of a war in Iraq whose validity many had questioned. He also came to represent the disparity between the equipment given to troops and the job that was demanded of them. At the inquest Rose had fought so hard for, the coroner said the army's failure to fit an electronic device to his Land Rover, which would have prevented the bomb detonating, had contributed to his death. The device had been in a nearby store for two weeks. By this point, Gordon was an emblem. More importantly, he was Rose's son.
Rose Gentle is both ordinary and extraordinary. Just a mother? Yes, with all the fierce, protective love implied by that. But also a fighter, a campaigner, a woman who poured her energy into the crucible of her grief and, like a glassmaker, fashioned from the intense heat something fragile and, in its way, beautiful. She was criticised, of course. The publicly bereaved often are. The way they do or don't talk. The way they do or don't cry. But a bereaved person feels what they feel. And they do whatever they can to cope with that emotion in their own way.
Gentle's way was to shout from the rooftops. Metaphorically, and perhaps sometimes literally, she shouted at Tony Blair. At George Bush. She shouted at MoD chiefs who left equipment in store cupboards while her son's blood poured on to the dusty streets of a foreign land. If it had been their sons, would they have been so casual about fitting the devices? And there are many of us who heard her shouting and cheered her. Not for the politics of what she said, not for the media brouhaha that ensued. But because she shouted for parents everywhere who loved their children. We cheered a love that refused to be silenced by death, a tenacity that refused to be quelled by authority.
There were those who said Gentle was simply a puppet of the left, of the anti-war campaign. As if a woman of 43 did not know what she felt about the death of her own son. Even if she had been manipulated, would she have deserved criticism? What we sometimes forget is that bereavement brings an incredible surfeit of emotion that simply has to go somewhere – and sometimes that means into campaigning.
We have seen it often. There is Diana Lamplugh, the mother of murdered estate agent Suzy, who devoted her life after her daughter's death to the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, fighting for the safety of society's young women. And the parents of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, who campaigned for years for justice for their son. Should we criticise such focused grief? Or empathise with the emotional energy that drives it? Sometimes, the only way to keep moving at all is to move faster.
In Gentle's case we threw into the pot of criticism some social snobbery. She was not middle class. She was not an articulate member of her local PTA or Women's Institute in a four-wheel-drive car. She was from the deprived area of Pollok in Glasgow and therefore it was assumed that someone else put words in her mouth. And really, maybe the only thing that was relevant about the Gentle family's working-class background was that when you come from Pollok, the inducements to join the army are all the more enticing. Gordon wanted to travel. He wanted to own a car but didn't have the money. He was 19 and he traded his life for some driving lessons and a trip to a war zone.
How ironic, then, that he died in a vehicle that was not properly equipped. No wonder Gentle made a noise for her child. Because Gordon was a child to her. There is a strange poignancy about a very young but very tall body, the juxtaposition of strength and weakness. Any parent who has seen their teenager hurt knows about looking at a grown body and seeing the shadow of the child who climbed on your knee with a cut finger and howled.
So while most of us have never met Gentle, we understand her. She makes it to the Scot of the Year list as Everywoman. Take away the politics, take away the controversy, and most parents understand who she is. When we see the tragedy of another family, we sometimes tentatively try to see the world through their eyes, just for a moment. Then it's too painful, so we snap them closed and turn away to look at something else, or indulge in the displacement activity of criticism.
But Rose Gentle is the woman who in 2007 prised open the eyes of every mother, every father, and made them face the unthinkable. She showed us all a son who was dead, and a parent's love that wasn't.
Catherine Deveney
