Vicki Woods
Next Wednesday evening, an 84-year-old Nepali citizen, frail and in poor health, will arrive at Heathrow on a Virgin flight from New Delhi, to be met by a near-royal reception: an official guard of honour from the Royal Gurkha Regiment. After which, the old boy will be whisked off into a merry sea of hundreds of the wellwishers and campaigners who forced the Home Office into the tightlipped and begrudging U-turn over his entry visa.
The frail Nepali is of course the (now) globally celebrated Rifleman Tulbahadur Pun VC, who has been granted "indefinite leave to remain" (ILR) in Britain, the country he was prepared to die for during the Burma campaign. He is thrilled by the thought of the ceremonial that will greet him (having done honour guard duty himself "many times"), but he is upset that he won't be able to see it clearly. (His eyesight being very poor now.)
Shamingly, I'd never heard of Tulbahadur Pun VC until I read about him on the Army Rumour Service website (ARRSE) in May. (Shamingly because my late pa fought alongside the Gurkha Rifles in Burma.) But everyone's heard of him now: he's on Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook; he's the top hit on Google for "Gurkha VC hero".
ARRSE first mentioned him on May 24, saying he'd applied for a visa to the British Embassy in Kathmandu, which was refused, in the formulaic words of the British Consul, Richard Beeson, because Pun VC had "failed to demonstrate close ties to the UK". This lunatic judgment reduced first hundreds, then thousands of ARRSE-posters to gibbering outrage. The next day, a post popped up from Kieran O'Rourke of Howe & Co, saying they were Mr Pun's solicitors, working pro bono and preparing to appeal the Home Office decision. They'd set up an online campaign: www.vchero.co.uk, which you should look up; it reduced me to choked snuffles.
O'Rourke said his firm was working for many other Gurkhas who'd been refused ILR as well (on the same slimy "no ties" grounds). ARRSE is a site for former and serving military personnel, and it went completely crazy (as it did its sister sites for the RAF and the Navy). They began emailing MPs, MEPs, MSPs, Lords, the Queen, the Prince of Wales (C-in-C of the Royal Gurkha Regiment), the Home Office, the ambassador in Kathmandu, the hapless Richard Beeson, TV and radio stations, Viscount Slim. They urged each other to use "snail-mail" as well, to ring official phones and leave annoyingly lengthy (but constrained) expressions of outrage.
I think it was ARRSE who worked out that Joanna Lumley's father was in the same horrific firefight at the railway bridge at Mogaung in June 1943, where Pun's unbelievable bravery saved the day (and Major Lumley's life, she believes), singlehandedly. I wish I had room for the clipped, precise VC citation, but you can find it at www.vchero.co.uk. "Outstanding courage", it reads, and "superb gallantry in the face of almost certain death".
Howe & Co are in Nepal as I write, to accompany Pun VC home to Britain and seeing as many of their 2,000 other Gurkha clients as they can while they're there. TWO THOUSAND. I do hope Jacqui Smith and young Dave Miliband find that figure as interesting as I do, though it was Liam Byrne's decision, in fact, as the minister i/c letting 'em in (asylum, immigration) as well as keeping 'em out (Gurkhas).
"They're the bravest of the brave," said O'Rourke yesterday on a dodgy line from Pokhara, Nepal, where it's raining harder than here. "That's the old line about Gurkhas and it's true: these men were Gurkhas themselves, their grandfathers fought in Burma and they have sons and nephews serving now in Iraq and Afghanistan. The state some of them are in is pitiful; there's so much poverty."
Their pension is about £100 a month. "Mr Pun had a three-day journey to get it; the whole first day being carried in a wicker basket 14,000ft down the mountain. And if you're too ill to go in person, you don't get paid." He wants them all let in, all these men whose "ties to the UK" are so close you'd have to be mad not to see them. I want them let in, too. It's only 150,000 or so.
It was the sheer weight of public outrage that forced Liam Byrne's U-turn on Pun. "It was less than three weeks, and it was getting bigger all the time. Martin [Howe] went on Radio 4 and in two hours we got 6,000 emails. Not a single negative one, not one.
"But they're outraged about the Gurkhas. 'I fought with them in Malaya'; 'I've got the Burma Star, here's a £10 cheque'; 'I've never sent an email in my life - my son's helping me'." One old lady came round to our offices and tried to give us £500! In cash! We said we couldn't take it off her."
Howe & Co's next campaign is for L/Cpl Gyanendra Rai, who fought and nearly died at Bluff Cove in the Falklands. He was saved by British Army doctors, who grafted skin from a British soldier on to his appalling wounds. He still suffers from his wounds, but gets no pension at all, having been invalided out before he finished his 15 years. Look him up: his story will make you howl.
"I will try my utmost," said PM Brown on the steps of Number 10. (Actually, he said "my outmost", but whether from first-night nerves or from regional vowel shift, we'll never know.) He and his duff Defence Secretary should try their utmost to work out what "close ties to the UK" actually mean. In my book, battlefield flesh and blood come pretty close.
