What a way to start the week!

I happened to have theTV on this morning and suddenly found I couldn’t stop watching a BBC programme called Remembrance Day.  And I’ve been crying my eyes out ever since.  Dear God!  It was so, so moving.  Now, I have to say that I have never been able to read any of the Trench Poets without tears rolling down my face; Wilfred Owen’s Dulce Et Decorum Est being my favourite and the pathos surrounding his life and death is truly upsetting.  And on Remembrance Day, those words “They shall not grow old as we who are left grow old.  Age shall not weary them, nor the years condem.  In the going down of the sun and in the morning we shall remember them.” always have me sobbing – just as I am now as I’m writing this.  And although those poems were written almost a hundred years ago they are as vivid and as poignant today as they were then.

This morning’s programme, presented by Gethin Jones, looked at three conflicts: the Normandy Landings of WWII, the Iraq War of 1990 and Afghanistan in the present day where we are laughingly called a ‘peace-keeping force’, I understand.  I say ‘laughingly’ because we have lost so many of our troops in this conflict.  A beautiful young woman called Thea spoke lovingly of her fiance Captain Steve Healey, who was killed when his vehicle drove over an IED.  She spoke of their warm, loving relationship, the plans they had made and of the terrible moment when his parents pulled up outside her house to give her the devastating news of his death.

Thea, though, has tried to salvage something positive from this tragedy and as Steve was 415th British Service Personnel to lose his life in Afghanistan she decided to run four hundred and fifteen miles in his honour and memory, raising £15,000 for charity in the process.  The WWII veteran (whose name I missed because it had already started when I turned in) said how, as an Infantryman, he was told his average life expectancy would be “about three weeks”.  Can you imagine being told that at 17 or 18?  He’s now 88 but he goes to Normandy every year to visit the graves of his fallen friends. “They had no life,” he said.

And the third interviewee was John Peters, who together with his navigator, John Nichol, was taken prisoner in Iraq after they had to bail out over the desert when their plane was hit and caught fire.  It was obvious from the interview how the torture and seven weeks of captivity still affect him and he paid tribute to his fallen comrades and said he was only alive today “Because my friends did their job”.

I defy any normal, feeling being to watch these men and not be moved.

When we wear our poppies it’s for men and women such as these and those who did not make it home that we’re wearing them for.  I always hear a lot of rubbish spouted at this time of year about British Imperialist Policies etc etc., but wearing a poppy doesn’t mean you’re pro-war. I most certainly am not.  I don’t wear my poppy to show I supported Blair sending other mother’s sons to their deaths while his wife stood wailing about press-intrusion into her own pampered offspring’s first term at university. No!  I wear it in memory of those who never came back, and in gratitude that my own father, a merchant navy stoker accompanying the N Atlantic convoys in WWII got through safely, together with seven of his brothers who also saw active service in WWII and Korea.

A friend of mine, the actor and writer Kenny O’Connor has written a fabulous one-act play about WWI called Stand and Deliver.  I understand he’s working on making it into a film and if he does – and I sincerely hope he will – it will be well-worth seeing and I urge you to.

Much is made today of bringing back National Service, and I think there’s an argument for giving young people, especially those not in work, education or training, some sort of pre-army experience because it would improve their lives By teaching them skills and getting them off street corners.  But I certainly don’t want to see any more young lives lost in conflicts.  No more lions lead by donkeys.

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