Remembrance

It seems appropriate to write about Remembrance Day, especially on a cold and overcast day in November. It’s easier now for me to understand and appreciate the sacrifices made by those brave men and women who lost their lives in the line of duty. Yet each year, as November 11 approaches, I am a nine-year-old child wearing a red felt poppy, standing next to my desk, listening to “a special guest” read “In Flanders Fields.” Fidgeting, nervous giggling and whispering was frowned upon in Mr. Wright’s classroom. In the days leading up to our classroom commemoration of the vets, we were reminded of the seriousness of the occasion and how we were expected to be on our best behaviour. The “or else” was implied. Somehow we were expected to understand the sacrifices made for our freedom even though many veterans (and we all knew veterans) never spoke of the horrors they had experienced in service to their country.

When I look back, I probably didn’t know any more about what had taken place than my father knew when he decided to enlist. What would a 17-year-old high school kid know about world conflict, about who did what with which and to whom? He had just finished senior matriculation—grade 13. He had a girlfriend. He wanted to go to university. When I look at photos of my father, when he was 17, I see a face I know and love but find it hard to believe he thought he was man enough to fight for his country. In one of my favourite photographs of my father, I see a young man surrounded by a crush of teenaged friends, all mugging for the camera, wearing their St. Mike’s jackets, not one of them clocking in at more than 120 pounds, including the weight of their cigarettes, skates and hockey sticks. Every young man in that photograph, bypassed college and university and hightailed it to the Recruitment Centre as soon as the last dismissal bell rang at St. Mike’s.

In May of 1994 my own family stood on the beaches of Normandy. Our oldest son was just 22 and our youngest son was almost 17. LOML and I were deeply knowing, given similar circumstances, our young sons might have had the same mindset as my Dad had so many years previous. They would have pushed their school books aside for a uniform, a few weeks of basic training and a trip to Europe on a troop ship. LOML and I were overwhelmed as we watched our sons walk ahead of us across the hills surrounding those beaches. They were too young. They didn’t know anything about the world. How could they make it right when they couldn’t even be counted on to make their beds? Their lives revolved around school, part-time jobs, parties, homework, skateboarding and pick-up hockey.

Until that trip I wore a poppy in November and on the eleventh of the month bowed my head in silence because that’s what we did. I wasn’t really connected. I had nothing to remember. My Dad’s war hadn’t happened during my time. It hadn’t been my war. I was born after WWII—I’m a baby boomer, a “honey I’m home” kid. I knew my Dad had spent about four years in the RCAF, but he never was the kinda guy to give up any of his “military” secrets. The reality of his short-lived youth was a mystery. Oh, I knew my Dad had been a Flight Sergeant, it said so on the little bit of paper tucked in between the sheets of tissue in the trunk with his uniform. And from that paper I knew my Dad was a bomber, a night flyer in the Lancasters.

In 2009, weeks before my father’s death, he spoke a bit more about his time in the Air Force. He told me about being on leave in April of 1944 when he and Mom got married. He told me it wasn’t much of a honeymoon because he took the train to Montreal two days after the ceremony and within weeks was night flying in a plane that sometimes got so cold a guy’s hands stuck to the instruments and levers during their night flights—”couldn’t wear gloves ‘cuz you needed to feel what you were doing, no light in the belly of the Lancaster during night flights.”

On November 11 at eleven o’clock in the morning, two minutes of silence used to seem like a lifetime—someone else’s lifetime. Now there hardly seems to be enough time to remember the men and women who volunteered for the cause of our freedom and our peace. Remember them, on Remembrance Day. Remember them.

theresa@wellingtontimes.ca