Echoes of the past

On Tuesday we will be in Aberdeen to see a display on the Titanic disaster put together by Grandson Talpa's school class. We are invited to dress in period costume and so Mrs T has been rummaging looking for something appropriate. While doing so she came across this small locket dating from the First World War.

It was worn by my great aunt Mary and it contains small, hand coloured photographs of her sister Lily and her brother Arthur. Lily was, at the time, an auxillary nurse in the Military Hospital in Honley where the family lived. I never knew Lilly as she died tragically young in 1921. Arthur lived to the ripe old age of 84 and I knew him as the kindest and gentlest of men, a man of simple tastes who asked very little of life. Looking at his young face and into his sad eyes I can feel just how much he must have hated the hardship and horror of war.