In remembrance

Remembrance Day is always an important time of year.  I wanted to write this yesterday, on the actual anniversary, but had IT problems, so here it is one day late. 

Remembering began on Saturday afternoon, when I attended ‘Tea at the Blitz’ at a local church. 

We sat at long tables, and ate sandwiches and cake which had been arranged on dainty cake stands. 

We were entertained by brilliant amateurs dressed in Forties costumes, who performed monologues, and sang wartime songs. 

Most of those attending were older people.  Some were probably children during the Second World War, but if they are like my parents this means that in some ways it is even more vivid than an adult memory.  But some must have said goodbye to boyfriends and brothers, and never seen them again.  One was dressed in her Land Girl uniform. 

Each song began with a slightly unfamiliar introduction, but then as the singers launched into the chorus of ‘We’ll meet again’, or ‘There’ll be blue birds over the white cliffs of Dover’, the old voices swelled around the room in an almost unbearably poignant reminder of the past.  The lady opposite me began to cry, and I dared not look at daughter S next to me in case we joined in. 

Finally everyone sang ‘There’ll always be an England’, and it wasn’t jingoistic, it was about belonging. 

Afterwards we all agreed that it had been ‘very emotional’ and I wondered about the stories of each of the older people there, and what they had been thinking. 

S said it had brought home to her in a new way what it must have been like to live through a war, particularly as she now had a fiancé. 

Then on Sunday we had the two minute silence at church, and once again commemorated the dead in wars. 

At work yesterday the silence wasn’t marked, but I went and stood on the stairs for a couple of minutes. 

How do those long sad shadows touch someone in middle age who is contemplating an empty nest?  They are there in my parents’ memories, still immediate now but soon probably to live on only in my memory and my sister’s through the tales our parents told us.  They are there in the national psyche – books like The Great War and Modern Memory show how the First World War affected so much of our culture. They are there too maybe in a determination to carry on valuing the sacrifices made by those boys and young men who will not grow old as we grow old, and to live in a way that would make my great uncles proud, grateful that I have been spared the suffering of war. 

Wilfred Owen put it better than I ever could.