Day To Remember

After being startled awake in the early hours by a false fire alarm Mrs S and I had another early start, breakfast was eaten fully ‘suited & booted’ ready for the parade and a day full of memories.

We made our way outside the hotel ready to walk to the taxi rank when a London Cab pulled up sharply and with a “hop in” we were whisked free of charge to Trafalgar Square.
Two hours on Horseguards chatting with fellow veterans as the square slowly filled to capacity before we moved in our columns out onto Whitehall to form up.
The service went ahead, very moving and the parade started, we waited for our turn, chatting to the crowd and the police, so close behind the barriers I could reach out and shake the offered hands.
Thousands of people, yet it was so still, so quiet and then it was our turn to move off. The day is best summed up by;

“For one day a year the hustle and bustle of London's Whitehall - gawking tourists, chanting protestors and hooting taxis - is swept away and in its place a very different slice of Britain descends.

Today came military veterans, lots of us, in blazers and berets, well-shined shoes and crisply-creased trousers, with nods to old comrades and service rivals.

Today families were making sure their loved ones were remembered and today were people who had come to see the spectacle, but also to pay their respects.

The crowds that line Whitehall on Remembrance Sundays do not all dress up for the occasion. But this is a Britain with Sunday-best manners, polite and orderly, this is a day of unity in divided times.

The hinge of this day is the eleventh hour - that time on 11 November 1918 when four terrible years of slaughter came to end.

The two minutes' silence that falls after Big Ben sounds sees faces long with memory and grief, none more so than the King, a single poppy blazing out from the blue-grey lapel of his RAF greatcoat.

A command barked into the thick cold air: "Stand at ease, stand easy." The troops settle a little.

And then began the beating heart of the day, the parade of veterans, in berets and bowler hats, sometimes in wheelchairs and sometimes led by guide dogs.

As we passed the Cenotaph - Whitehall's 103-year-old war memorial - heads swung left in unison, some give a sharp salute.

And, as we passed, some yielded up their ring of poppies, which are taken to the base of the Cenotaph and laid gently down, the ring of red around the simple monument gradually becoming a long carpet of remembrance.”


We wheeled round back towards Horseguards where the Princess Royal took the Veterans salute at the March Past.
And then it was over, aching legs, stiff joints from four hours of standing and marching forgotten in an instant. A coffee and we set off for Westminster Abbey.
More emotion as we slowly walked through the Field Of Remembrance, we arrived at the WRNS Association section and as we looked at the names on the crosses we thought to lay one for our friend, and Richard’s wife Jackie. With no cash Mrs S and I were looking for a debit card when a middle aged couple insisted on paying for our cross, tears as we wrote on the cross.

Then back up to Trafalgar Square passing smartly clad doormen who thanked us for our service before grabbing a pavement seat at a cafe for a much needed coffee. People asking for photos and one young lad, late teens, early twenties crossing the full width of the pavement to ask if he could shake our hands and thank us for our service, humbling.
We eventually arrived back at our hotel, shattered for dinner where we were waited on by Tyrone, great young man, chatty, funny and the supplier of a free beer for “two nice people”.
Mrs S and I eventually collapsed into bed shattered a little after nine o’clock.