Thoughts on Remembrance Day
I often think that I owe my life to the lorry. Yes, to the lorry. That’s a strange thing to say, but let me explain. Today we take lorries for granted, but at the turn of the century they were quite rare. Most long distance transport was done by rail, and short distances were done by horse and cart. So if you could drive a lorry you were someone quite special, a bit like a helicopter pilot today.
In 1914, the First World War broke out and my Grandfather, like many of his generation, decided to join up. He was going to join the local regiment, but a few years earlier he had learnt how to drive a lorry, and a friend advised him that you could get better pay in the army if you joined up as a driver. So he took the train up to London, volunteered for the motorised transport element of the Army Service Corps, and spent the war years moving supplies and ammunition along the roads of France and Belgium. He had one or two narrow escapes.... a couple of times he had to jump out of his cab and dive into the nearest ditch as his lorry came under shellfire. But on the whole it was a much safer way to spend the war than being in the front-line trench on the Somme or at Ypres. So he survived, he married and had a son, his son had a son, and that is why I am here today.
The 220 Latymerians whose names are listed on the memorials, either side of the hall, were not so lucky. They didn’t come home like my Grandfather came home. They lie in graves – if they have graves, and many do not – wherever they fought. Like you, they were young. Like you, they had their lives ahead of them. And their families mourned for them, as yours would for you.
The poppy is a wonderful flower. It produces hundreds of tiny seeds, so small that if they fall into dense undergrowth they will be smothered. But if they fall into freshly cleared soil, they grow in huge numbers. So for generations they were found in the wheat fields where the farmers’ plough had turned over the soil and eliminated their competition. But on the Western Front it wasn’t the farmers’ plough which turned over the soil. Here the soil was churned by high explosive shells. And where the soil was churned, the poppies grew, fertilised by the blood of thousands of young men, whose bodies had been ripped apart by machine guns or blown to bits by artillery. The poppies were dashes of colour in a landscape of mud, reminders of beauty in a world of death and desolation. And so it was, that after the Armistice came into effect, at the 11th hour of the 11th day, of the 11th month of 1918, exactly ninety-one years ago, the poppy was chosen as the symbol of remembrance.
The memorials on either side of the hall only commemorate the Latymerians who died in the First World War. There is another, at the front of the hall, with the names of those who died in the Second. There are several Latymerians serving in the armed forces today; some have fought in Afghanistan, some in Iraq. Some of them, I have taught. I hope that we will not need to put up any more war memorials.
J.S.Gilbert