Remembering Again

Awfully late as usual, I know: we kept Remembrance at Swanvale Halt on Sunday 10th, though for a second year I had to be absent, much to my regret, leading prayers at the War Memorial at Hornington as Chair of the local branch of Churches Together. I hope a suitable layperson will come forward to do that job next year, although precipitate haste in this respect seems to be somewhat wanting.

For the last couple of years the children in Junior Church have come forward at the appropriate point to lay wreaths at our memorial in the church, but we decided that, as we can't guarantee there will be any children in the congregation at the moment, and as the ones we had never seemed especially comfortable with the whole experience, we would get grown-ups to do it. I asked Bill, a longstanding member of the congregation who served with the Navy in WWII, and Cora, a young Army wife from the Council estate who has no connection with the church other than the fact that she and her husband had their banns read with us a few months ago. Apparently it all went very well, and the fact that an elderly worshipper fainted during the Two Minutes' Silence and the paramedics had to be summoned didn't cause unreasonable disruption. In fact I wonder whether very many folk noticed.

I have to compliment the Poppy Appeal for their efficiency as I discovered on the Wednesday that we only had one wreath and had to order another. I couldn't get through on the phone and the only way of paying was using that archaic business of posting a cheque, a combination of not one but two near-obsolete processes. And the wreath arrived on Saturday morning.

A friend of mine complained on Facebook about the levels of 'poppy fascism' this year, remarking that, as far as she recalled her own childhood, the dragooning of the whole of society including small children into the observation of Remembrance is a relatively recent development. She tried to keep her daughter away from it only to discover that the whole infants school she attends had been marched to the War Memorial and said little girl, egged on by her High Tory dad, insisted that she should have a poppy though probably more for the colour than for any historical and emotional significance. I think my friend is right about the change in the way Britain thinks about Remembrancetide, but still maintain that it's possible to maintain a proper sense of decorum about the whole thing; recalling the deaths in war not only of combatants, but also civilians, and making sure that politicians are kept firmly in their place in Remembrance observances - permitted, perhaps, to lay wreaths, but certainly to do or say nothing else. In fact, I think that a sharper-eyed assessment of the reality of war is precisely what has allowed the emergence of the modern reverence for the rituals of the second Sunday in November.

I suspect Blackadder has much to do with it as well.