Armistice Day

A group of British soldiers relax among the sand dunes on the coast of northern France. It is late spring 1917. In a few weeks they will advance to Passchendaele, where the poppies blow. By the end of the year almost all of the men in this photograph will be wounded, dead or dying, between the crosses, row on row. Among them are my great uncle Thomas and my maternal grandfather Harold, a grocer from St Helens. 

Harold is shot first. Then, patched up, he returns to Ypres, and in the sky the larks, still bravely singing, fly. Weeks later he is gassed, taken to a casualty clearing station and then a base hospital. Thomas, hit by shrapnel, lies dying from his wounds. Short days ago we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow…. And now we lie in Flanders fields.

Classed as ‘permanently unfit’ Harold is discharged and returns, broken, to his shop in Lancashire, to you from failing hands we throw the torch. Within five years he dies (‘from the effects of gas inhalation’), a casualty of war but too late to be counted as a war casualty. 

My mother, scarce 14 months old, becomes an orphan. She is named after the Belgian nurse who cared for Harold, in Flanders fields. Years later she takes black ink and marks a cross on the photograph beside the grandfather I would never know and the father she could not remember, lest we forget.