11 - that's a football team!

Where did you spend your 3rd wedding anniversary? No, I can't remember, either. But my grandfather spent his in France. This photo was taken on 1st June 1917 "on the 3rd anniversary of a very happy day". On the back is a touchingly personal message to his wife, my grandmother.

Alongside is the shrapnel that was removed from his foot. The poor soldier standing at Grandpa's side took the full hit and fell dead. My grandfather's injury was a 'Blighty one'. It was bad enough that he was stretchered out of the trenches to a French sanitorium, later to be transferred to an English convalescent home. He was lucky. (His bed in the sanitorium - lined up between nos. 12 and 14 - was No. 12a. This amused him as the number 13 had always been his 'lucky number' - not that he was superstitious; it was just a number that kept cropping up in his life.)

Had he not lived, I am among 11 who would never have been born: my mother, I and my two siblings, our five children, and my sister's two grandchildren. He might have enjoyed the irony of this blip's title: he and my mother vied with each other to know as little as possible about football!

My grandfather was an artist and photographer. He disliked all things military, especially pomp and pagentry, so my memories of him today, on Remembrance Sunday, are not of a soldier, but of a sensitive, gentle man whom I can just remember. (He died when I was six.) Here's a poem I wrote about the man who, as a child (just like my daughter), had pet rats. It enabled him to enjoy watching the rats ...

IN THE TRENCHES

Spirits cruelly dampened in the trenches,
strong men cried and glory lost its shine,
songs died on their lips, the music faded
with images of loved-ones left behind.

They had no choice but to share their rations
with rats, and observed their cunning skill:
the rodents learned to pierce the tins on both sides
to guarantee a flow of Nestlé's Milk.

No words do justice to the pain and killing,
the misery of the trenches and the squalor,
but - for a moment - one man paused to marvel
at the rat's resourceful mind amid the horror.

poem © Celia Warren

Today, I shall try to think of all who've laid down their lives for our freedom, past and present. Soldiers are not warmongers; they are there to keep the peace and protect human rights. It is politicians who make war.