Remembrancetide

Pressed poppies, collected October/November 1998

The tenth of November this year falls halfway between Remembrance Sunday and Armistice Day, making a period of Remembrance. I am deeply uneasy with the notion of remembering the war dead whilst doing nothing to prevent wars today; and especially as at the moment we as a country are still heavily involved in two illegal, immoral foreign wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And yet remembering (especially) the Great War seems fitting at this time, perhaps because it as far back as human memory currently stretches. There are at least three British veterans still alive, old men who visit schools to tell their stories to children who are a century younger than they are. Their First World War memories are all the more precious as they have aged and others have died; but it defines a person only by one time of their lives, and that 90 years ago. Perhaps we remember because we all have a Great War family story and like a British Day of the Dead we remember family stories at this time. I don't know.

Ten years ago I wrote a play called 'Third Light' which commemorated the 80th anniversary of the end of the Great War and dealt with these confused themes. One of the actors, Graham Frood, was old enough to remember the war; he heard the engines of a Zeppelin flying over his house in Stoke and hid under the table with his family; he remembered the engines as they were such a rarity. He also remembered two bonfires in the November of 1918, one for Bonfire Night and one for the Armistice. Sean Halligan, who played a far younger man, helped in selecting a performance venue and we visited Birkenhead Priory with the Wirral's links with Wilfred Owen. On a new traffic island outside was a brilliant flush of blood-red poppies and we picked a handful to press. Today, ten years later, I found them.

And at this time I remember my grandfathers, who both played a part in the first war. Vincent Lewis was a teenage sea scout and spent some time coastwatching on Bolt Head in Devon, possibly the furthest he ever travelled from Liverpool. My mother's father was a corporal in the Royal Welch Fusiliers and was wounded at Passchendaele. We have letters and medals and cap badges and photographs; history I suppose we can almost touch.