‘Remembrance always moves me,’ says Fakenham columnist
In his weekly Wensum column, Jim Harding discusses Remembrance…
Our annual Remembrance Sunday service may be small-scale but never fails to move me each year. The opening is traditionally marked by the Town Band parading along Norwich Street into the square in company with scouts, guides, cadets and other significant groups in the town.
These assemble around the war memorial which becomes the centre of attention when wreaths are laid at its foot. The short service led by our rector, the Rev Tracy Jessop, appealed in prayer for reconciliation between all nations and all who had suffered the consequences of pain and conflict.
Remembered were the service personnel who had died in wars and members of the armed forces who were currently in danger. After the wreaths were laid the Last Post and Reveille was played by the Town Band's Peter Dixon. The substantial crowd in attendance joined in the singing of the National Anthem before the parade members moved across the square to the parish church, its Union flag flying high from the tower, for the United Service.
Next to me watching the proceedings was a gentleman in a wheelchair who I reckoned was older than me but still in good health. He remarked that he was looking forward to a significant birthday in January next year which, looking at him, I thought might be his 90th. He was pleased to let me know that he would then be 100 which very much thrilled me.
And also to know that as a treat, some friends would be taking him down to London to visit a war museum close to his heart. Somehow that brief encounter lifted my spirits for the remainder of the day. We live in a troubled world which makes watching the news or reading the papers an often tough experience, even though I do both on a regular basis.
Lest We Forget has become a significant cornerstone of every remembrance occasion and will doubtless remain so in the future. I certainly hope so, keeping in mind my Woking friend Wilf who was imprisoned by the Japanese in Singapore during the Second World War and never talked about that part of his young life.
When I travelled to Thailand in my twenties he begged me to try and visit the bridge on the River Kwai so that I could talk to him about it on my return. I did so and was also able to locate the nearby cemetery at Kanchanaburi where so many graves of young soldiers from allied countries were buried.
The one positive I was able to convey to Wilf was that the cemetery was kept in very good condition, its lawns cut neatly and the whole place obviously given regular attention. Wilf found it difficult to fit back into our society after all he'd been through but as a lifeguard at the Woking swimming pool kept himself fit and enjoyed regular early morning keep-fit sessions with me and a couple of other friends.
Cold water swimming was a part of all this. When I think back to those days of my youth and the opportunities I've had to travel here, there and everywhere in comparative freedom, it makes the significance of remembrance services, still held in communities big and small all over the country here so much more meaningful.
My passport and even the Union Flag painted hopefully on the back of my rucksack at my Old Woking home, opened so many doors and caught so many positive eyes when I hitched through countries such as Syria, Iraq and later Pakistan, India and Nepal on my way out to Australia in 1963.
