Remembrance

My hero...

If you look up ‘remembrance’ in the dictionary, alongside ‘the act of remembering and showing respect for someone who has died or a past event’ it also says ‘a memory of something that happened in the past’. The fear is that, after all these years, fewer and fewer people actually remember the wars. The last veteran to serve in the trenches in World War One was Harry Patch, who died in 2009, and year on year there are noticeably fewer veterans from World War Two at the Cenotaph, who have real memories of the conflict. Looking to the future, this can only make the act of remembrance increasingly more abstract.

I have no answers for how to fix this, but I can talk about my experiences of how I was taught about, what I thought of as ‘the war’, when I was small.

Would we have been here?

Every Sunday, my family would have tea (not dinner, that was for lunch time) and sit together around the table eating ham, salad, and home made cakes and biscuits. Afterwards my dad would regale us with tales from his time in the army. He’d joined the army as a medic shortly after the Second World War was declared, only a month after he’d married my mum. 

A month before the outbreak of war

Most of the stories he told were lighthearted and funny - about how he travelled the country to get home on leave, doing his best not to pay his train fares. He argued that the government was sending him miles from home, so why should he pay to get back! The scarier recollections were usually about his time on leave, when my mum and dad were fired on by a German fighter plane, or the damage done to the family home by a bomb raid. Although he shared tales of getting seasick on manoeuvres (practice for D-Day) or getting tipsy one Christmas on sherry trifle in a hospital in Burma, he didn’t really talk about any of the horrific things that he must have seen. 

This was new information!

However, during a period of prolonged ill-health, he decided to write his ‘memoirs’. We were older by this time, and me and my brothers and sister teased him mercilessly. We thought we’d heard the tales a million times, and couldn’t think why any one else would want to read them. And then we read them. My dad was a total hero. He landed in Normandy  on D Day, and was promoted in the water, because his sergeant got swept away and drowned. He travelled on an ambulance jeep to reach the wounded under sniper fire, with only the red cross to ‘protect’ him and, at the end of the war, helped clean up and reclothe inhabitants of concentration camps. And all this in his twenties and early thirties. The other underlying thread of his stories was how much he loved my mum and how desperate he was to get home to her. My hero!

My lovely Mum

I think of everything to do with remembrance, what resonates with me is that these men and women were so young. We see veterans and think of them as ancient. But they weren’t when they were fighting, battling to make the World a better place for others, separated from their loved ones. I am well aware that there have been many

other conflicts since - the Falklands, Iraq, Afghanistan - but the people involved in the two World Wars had no choice. They weren’t career soldiers, and if they didn’t enlist, they were conscripted.

I am, at heart, a pacifist and my dad always said he would only enlist as a medic - he didn’t want to carry arms - but I recognise the sacrifice that over a million people made, and it is right that we remember them. Whether you do that wearing a poppy, or by taking a quiet moment to think about where we would be if no-one had stopped the Nazis, you should do it. And when poppies are being sold and your children ask why, maybe take some time to explain that thousands of young men and women went to war to protect the World from evil and make it a better place. Then there’s a chance that, even if nobody actually remembers the conflicts, we can all honour and show respect for past events.

A Different Kind of Hero

Paralympic Mascot Tom (if I'm honest I preferred Mandeville...)

I’m sure I’m not alone in having watched, open-mouthed, as Paralympians from around the World pushed themselves in sporting endeavours that defy belief.

How do you find the courage to sprint as fast as you can, trusting someone else to lead you safely because you have little or no vision?

How do you control a horse in a dressage routine, when you have such little control over your own body?

How do you swim without arms? Or legs?

And how on earth do you control a wheelchair with one hand and accurately wield a tennis racquet in the other?

It is a real testament to the human spirit, and a lesson to all of us who grumble about a minor ache or pain.

The Paralympians are justifiably lauded, successful or otherwise, and rightly proclaimed as heroes. They have all overcome significant difficulties or life changing events to strive to do their best in the field of sport, and should be admired. 

As the successful Team GB Paralympians have returned to Britain, it has sparked a debate on whether their success has raised enough awareness to have a positive impact on the daily lives of ordinary people living with disability. We need to remember that, for every Johnny Peacock or Dame Sarah Storey, there are thousands of others who live with disability, not on a World stage, but within the mundanity of daily life. Their struggle is not against the clock, but against a society that does not seem to make anything easy, and that doesn’t understand how to treat people that are different from the norm. 

So I am applauding a different kind of hero - the person who defies the odds to succeed in their career, despite visual impairment or living with cerebral palsy; the person who struggles to  recover from a life changing stroke in order to hold their grandchildren again; the student with autism who struggles to cope in a mainstream school, with some staff who understand their particular needs and some who simply can’t appreciate the dilemma of being told to hurry to class, and yet being told not to run! 

All of those people are striving to achieve against the odds, in a much less public arena. Not always recognised as such, they really are heroes too.