EDP Column 5
I found an old photo, taken in one of the first years we were at Barn Owl Farm, of the field next door covered with poppies. It was a magnificent sight, many people stopped to gaze in wonder and take photos. This lead me to thinking about poppy day and the importance of “lest we forget”.
My mother spent the war years, as a child, in the Eric Gill Community in Ditchling, Sussex. Her mother’s sister was married to George Maxwell one of the co-founders of The Guild. It was an artistic and religious community where the men sculpted, carved wood and sat and philosophised with the help of G K Chesterton, H G Wells and Kipling, while the women worked like house slaves. Despite the hard work my great aunt Cis was a remarkable woman, I knew her when she was old but she still kept a pig and bees. Her bees loved her and used to buzz about her in the garden, leaving me with a lifelong ambition to keep bees. I have joined the Norfolk Bee Keepers Association but that’s as far as I’ve got!
Anyway! Great Uncle George and Cis had a son, Stephen, and he and my mother grew up together and were best friends exploring the South Downs together. Then Stephen volunteered to fight in the 2nd World War. He joined the Gordon Highlanders. He fought in Africa and then was killed in Italy at Monte Casino. The night he died Great Aunt Sis heard his footsteps coming down the lane outside her house and the gate opening and she knew that he was dead. All my grown life I’d determined to take my mother to visit Stephen’s grave.
Later when I was working in Aberdeen and was able to visit the Gordon Highlanders Museum. They looked up where he was buried and even gave me the grave number. So my mother and I went to Italy. We drove down the coast, from Rome, stopping in Gaeta because my hairdresser is from there and down to Anzio. The cemetery is next to an ancient Roman ruined town by the sea in a beautiful, tranquil spot. It is superbly kept, immaculate lawns and flower beds, sprinklers playing on the grass and no one about on the day we went.
There are two thousand graves there with simple headstones with just the names and a symbol for the religion, a cross for Christian and a Star of David for the Jews. Moving beyond measure in the beauty of the simplicity. My mother wept and released the fifty year old pain of loss for Stephen. We then repaired to the hotel next door for restorative tea and chocolate cake. Mother was so very glad that she’d gone there, the American’s call it ‘closure’ and I can’t think of a better word to describe what she went through that day. In the big war cemetery further up the hill at Monte Casino we met a New Zealand girl who’d come to find her grandfather’s grave, which just made it clear to me how important these places are to remember the young men who died so gallantly for the succeeding generations. It was a desperately sad but uplifting experience.
We then had a very jolly week in Ravello and a few days in Rome, where outside the Coloseum my mother was chatted up by a very handsome centurion. They are dressed up so as the tourists can take photos with them. Well, that made her holiday! There is nothing left of the Ditchling Guild now except the works they left behind and the memories of the few who were children then, like my mother.
There are no poppies in the field this year, it is set aside, but we had many in David’s wild flower area in our garden. The power of these little frail flowers to invoke such memories never ceases to amaze me.