Armistice Day

I wrote this a few years ago, the first year I opened this blog. this year Armistice day coincided with Remembrance Sunday. I thought I'd bump it again.

This last Sunday was Remembrance Sunday. When you were little did you turn on the telly hoping for the cartoons, and catch the parade? All those people, in uniforms. So many in wheelchairs or using sticks and crutches. So many old people in uniform. And they all look proud to be there. Proud, and somehow guilty. And the woman, whose medals were always on the other side of the chest to most of the men.

Now I'm older I realise that parades like that, they are proud to be there. Proud and happy that they are being remembered. And even more that the people who can't be there were being remembered. And that is where the guilty comes in as well. The fact that they are there and their friends weren't. Why were they spared? in some cases, some may well be thinking why wasn't I? And the woman, and the sons, with the medals on the other side of their chest, walking in a dead man's shoes. They shouldn't be there. their husbands, fathers brothers. They should be there.

But they aren't. They are the folk who were buried with all honours. Or those who have a cross because there wasn't enough bits to find to bury - "missing presumed dead".

"And their words echo back from the graveyards of Flanders, singing old Jack Judge's song."

And now it has come back into the spotlight. War I mean. Iraq  and now Afghanistan. As the adverts say, every day is remembrance day for some families. This has always been the case, but now it is more noticeable perhaps. because now it is our generation who are dying, and being remembered. There are now so many more people who buy a poppy, and actually stop and think about what it means, what it represents.

When we were kids, poppy day, remembrance day was history. Part of that rich tapestry that so many people don't understand, and in some cases actively resent. People forget that their grandparents were once twenty, thirty years old. That they served in the war. The males in my father's side of the family have a history of military service. But my grandmother and her sisters - they helped as well. Land girls, Plotters under the hills of Portsmouth, Ambulance drivers - nan liked to drive fast until she stopped driving. They all did their part for their country, and did it proudly. They wanted desperately to help any way they could. And their parents, they had been through it all once before, in the first world war. Our parents had the troubles. The IRA, Ireland. "In a station, in a city, a British soldier stood". According to my father Harvey Andrews captured Ireland during the troubles in that song. He said that the first time he had made pretty much anyone listen to it the first time, it moved them to tears.

We don't have that. We don't have the experiences of our parents, our grandparents. And we can't imagine what it must be like. And deep inside, whilst I rage against our shallowness sometimes I'm glad that we probably never will. Because I'm not entirely sure how I would cope, how I would stand up to the legacy that that parade has left for all of us. So I will wear my poppy and try to understand what it must really be like for the people who were there.

This still strikes true. This still is true. I bought my poppy this year. Did you?