On Remembrance Sunday ...........

I can’t quite be sure when Remembrance Day passed from being a moment to acknowledge two world wars and the conflicts since, into something very personal.

Uncle George, 1918

It began with the birth of our eldest and grew as first dad and then my uncles died.

My father and his brothers were part of that generation that went off to the Great War and then again in 1939 and their passing ignited a new respect for the annual event on November 11th.

Over the last thirty years it is something that I mark quietly and on my own, usually in the kitchen in the middle of the hurly burly of preparing the Sunday roast.

But for that time either side of the two minute‘s silence I pause, listen to the wireless and reflect on my family.

We were lucky, of the six members of my immediate family who served in the Great War, all came back.

They included my great grandfather, my grandfather, two great uncles and two uncles.

Their regiments like their war experiences were different and varied.

Great grandfather, Montague, 1914

Great grandfather was in the West Kent’s, Uncle Fergus in the Black Watch, Uncle George in the Seaforth Highlanders, grandfather the Sherwood Foresters and a great uncle in the Canadian Expeditionary Force.

Uncle Fergus crossed the Rhine in the December of 1918 a month after the armistice and grandfather opted to stay in the army in Germany where he met and married my grandmother.

And that marriage meant that our family have relatives who were in the armed forces of Imperial Germany, others who served in the German army during the Second World War and because my partner is Italian, we have family members who experienced growing up in wartime Naples.

Uncle Roger, 1938

We lost just one close family member, and that was my Uncle Roger who like mother had been born in Cologne, and volunteered for the RAF in 1938, seeing action at the Fall of Greece and at Basra before being shipped out to Far East where he was captured by the Japaneses, and died in a prisoner of war camp camp in Thailand.

Mother also served in the RAF and was stationed on one of the aerodromes which took part in the bombing of her home city of Cologne.

All of which makes both world wars, a family civil war.

Like many young people growing up after the war, while I had my fair share of war films, played on bomb sites and read comics which romanticised the war, my parents, uncles and grandparents never spoke of either conflict.

If questioned they would answer briefly and then lead the conversation away into some other topic.

Grandmother's nephews in German uniforms, circa 1938

And then being a child of the 1960s I got sucked into a cynical, and shallow response which questioned everything and saw little of the value or the importance of that day in November.

And yes, that also made me part of the favoured generation who didn’t experience either the world wars, or the hungry ‘30s, and instead grew up against a backdrop of a National Health Service, free at the point of delivery, didn’t have to worry about school fees or university charges and could be confident that when I left school there would be a job that had security and paid well.

Mother, 1941

Of course there were bigger economic movements that made much of that possible but it was also down to my parents and grandparent who having endured a bleak first half century were determined to make the decades after the last world war, ones that their children and grandchildren would grow and develop.

And that is also something that informs my thoughts today.

I do think of those who have served, and those who died or were injured but also of the determination of those generations who worked to win the peace.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson