Remembrance

Yesterday was Remembrance Sunday. We had a very well attended service at Swallow - an excellent service with a thought provoking sermon by Canon Judy McMann - and we were joined at 11 o'clock by other villagers for the cenotaph ceremony after they had been to Mass at their own church. Two people old enough to remember the Second World War - Vi (Women's Land Army) and Richard (a farmer) laid the wreath and spoke the Exhortation, and Tom (on his fifteenth birthday) played the Last Post on his cornet. We have come a long way in the twenty years since my father reinstated the Remenbrance Day Ceremony in Swallow when a small group of us gathered at the war memorial to hear the ceremony in London on a car radio and to lay a wreath. Imagine a town in which over 20% of the population attends such an event - that would well over a million Londoners or getting on for twenty thousand Grimbarians - because that's the proportion of our village population who were there yesterday.

However, it is tomorrow which is the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice, and that set me thinking of the youngest brothers of each of my maternal grandparents who died in that war. Lieutenant Cyril Jones who was killed in France in 1917 aged 25, and Gunner William Huston who was gassed and, even younger, died a lingering death in 1919.

Unusually in those large late Victorian families those were the only two deaths, and there were none on my father's side.

But death is not by any means only way in which war has an effect on families and lives.

To begin with, my father would not be here at all were it not for war's fickle hand. My grandmother and her family would not have come to Grimsby as refugees had Germany not invaded Belgium, and my grandfather would never have met her while she was still a schoolgirl and he was a boy working for his father in the family business who happened to cycle past her school, spot her in the playground and fall in love.

Equally my other grandmother would not have been working in a bank in Norfolk if it hadn't been for the Great War. In 1914 she was studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, and her oldest brother, Archie, had to travel to France to escort her home when war was declared. By 1918 she would probably have been teaching in a girls' school somewhere or maybe have married a fellow student. Instead she took over Cyril's job in the bank thus releasing him for war service. And if it hadn't been for the war my grandfather would have been working in another bank and would not have gone in to her branch to cash his soldier's pay cheque.

And what of that grandad - my gentle little grandad who wanted nothing more of life than a happy home, a drink at the Conservative Club with his friends and peaceful weekend painting watercolours? What can it have been like for such a man serving four full years on the western front from joining up as a private, through sergeant to commissioned officer, seeing his men, his comrades and his friends killed while he miraculously survived.

And all the uncles: Frank and Eric in the Royal Flying Corps - also surviving very much against the odds. Clem on the Western Front and later in Ireland where he survived a attack at the Dublin hotel where the officers were billeted because he happened to have run into a cousin who was a sergeant and - against all the rules - the two of them had gone out in mufti for a night on the town; he came back to find that the hotel was swarming with police, that many of his fellow officers had been murdered in their sleep and that there was a bullet hole in the pillow where his head should have been. Archie was a clergyman and Charles was a hunchback, but Joe, Harry and Percy were all of an age to have fought in the war and presumably did so. And how many of the great aunts lost boyfriends in the war?

In the second world war Great Aunt Mary was a sergeant in the WRAF when she met, when they were both in their forties, Eric (by now a Wing Commander) at RAF Manby, and married him. Great Aunt Jeanne's husband was Chief of Police in Antwerp covertly supplying information to the resistance, while his brother-in-law, Great Aunt Malvine's husband Wilhelm, was working in the same city for the nazis. At the end of the war Malvine and Wilhelm went to his native Czechoslovakia where he is believed to have been imprisoned and killed by the Russians, and she was left to walk back across Europe to Belgium. It is very hard to imagine great aunts living lives so far removed from the careful housekeeping and elaborate meals which seem to be in the natural order of great-auntliness.

Grandad Turner, just too young to have fought in the Great War, in the Second was one of the first to join the Local Defence Volunteers (later the Home Guard) where he rose to be a captain, and first my uncle Frans and later my father were the 6th Lindsey's Private Pike. Despite repeated attempts to join up Daddy didn't get into the navy until it was all over bar the shouting, though he was involved with escorting home prisoners of the Japanese who had been too weak to bring home earlier which made a big impression on him. Frans on the other hand joined the army early on and was in the Signals Corps. He survived one of the bloodiest routs of the war at Arnhem when his inability to ride a motorbike excused him carrying a message and the lad who did take it was blown up by a mine within yards of setting out. He was later in one of the first units to enter Belsen. What must he have seen? And what too must Uncle Peter have seen as a young doctor serving with UNRA?

Many years later Peter went to war-torn Vietnam to work with crippled children, and it was there that my Aunt Barbara found herself caring for one of the little accidents of war, the child of a Vietnamese woman and an Afro-American man (two people who would never have met in the normal course of things) who was soon to become my cousin Paul. Nor was he the only family member to be affected by more recent wars: my cousin Philip, his next brother, saw his natural parents murdered by Pol Pot's men in Cambodia.

I am not claiming that any of this is out of the ordinary; such family histories are the common currency of the twentieth century. I wish that I believed that the twenty-first century showed any sign of being different.