It was pure coincidence that T and I found ourselves motoring through Flanders fields a week before Remembrance Sunday.
It was her birthday so we were on our way to the beautiful Belgian city of Bruges (or Brugge, in the local language; which is, rather confusingly, Dutch).
The city—much loved by tourists for its perfectly preserved 17th century architecture—is just a three-hour drive from Paris. We drove through the Somme, where the blood-red poppies grow wild, now symbolic of the dead of both world wars.
November 11 (the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, 1918, when the guns fell silent and the Armistice was signed) is a public holiday in France and Belgium.
In England, Remembrance Sunday is marked with sombre wreath-laying and salutes at the Cenotaph war memorial on Whitehall.
No war better demonstrates the futility of conflict than the Great War. It involved 60 million people and killed ten million servicemen and women—obliterating a significant proportion of an entire generation, some conscripted straight after leaving school or university.
It isn’t taught much in the Caribbean—European history having been replaced with Caribbean history in schools. It seems to me that a reminder of the barbarity that colonial Europeans did to each other, as well as to the Caribbean, wouldn’t go amiss.
The oldest surviving veteran of WWI died in 2012. Florence Green, who served in the Royal Air Force, was 110. Harry Patch, the longest surviving soldier to have died in those appalling trenches, died aged 111, in 2009. Having kept silent about the war for decades, he finally broke his silence when he turned 100, as though becoming a centenarian finally entitled him to speak.
He described the war as “organised mass murder” and England and Germany as two dogs fighting for their lives like savages.
One soldier who spoke out during the war was the poet Siegfried Sassoon. His poem Suicide In The Trenches is an enduring wound that brought home the reality of the horror.
“I knew a simple soldier boy who grinned at life in empty joy. Slept soundly through the lonesome dark and whistled early with the lark. In winter trenches, cowed and glum, With crumps and lice and lack of rum, He put a bullet through his brain. No one spoke of him again. You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye who cheer when soldier lads march by. Sneak home and pray you’ll never know the hell where youth and laughter go.”
In London, just before our Flanders excursion, I spent a week working the night shift as news reporter for London’s Evening Standard newspaper. At times I felt more like a detective than a journalist.
At the editor’s whim I door-stepped the Duke of Buccleuch’s neighbours to “get them to complain” about the “mega basement” being built under his South Kensington mansion; I traced a Sri Lankan divorcee awarded £750,000 in a settlement from her abusive millionaire husband to a refuge in Streatham Common.
And I revealed the identity of a Portuguese delivery man who died on his scooter in a road accident within sight of Stratford’s Olympic Stadium. When one editor tried to persuade me to obtain the dead man’s mobile phone number and his widow’s address I realised the tabloid journo life was not for me.
On the Kings Road in Chelsea (London’s wealthiest neighbourhood) I bought a poppy off a Chelsea pensioner (the red-coated retired soldiers housed at the nearby barracks.)
He had recently moved down to London from Leeds at the army’s invitation after his wife died. He knew nothing about the local disquiet over plans to build a £1bn train station as part of the £28bn Crossrail 2 project.
A small Italian boy asked him where he got all his medals and he began saying, “Malaya...” but the boy, perhaps suffering from ADD, cried out “whaa? whaaa?!” then grew disinterested.
Within an hour I realised my poppy had disintegrated and fallen off.
In medieval Bruges, we strolled the picturesque bridges and cobbled streets between canals and horse-drawn carts.
In the backstreets, away from the crowds, we made a superb discovery. An antique dealer with some astonishing African artefacts; mostly Congolese.
A huge wooden chiselled stick in a holder that villagers grind in a circular motion when trying to make a decision until it stops turning and the spirits have given the answer. Small weights in the shape of crocodiles and turtles from the border of Ghana and Ivory Coast, used to measure gold powder. Axes representing status. Scarification blades.
Arrowheads for short spears. A “bell” (more like a rattle) inside a leather pouch worn on the waist to let people know your location. And prehistoric flint “axe head” tools from the Neolithic and stone age periods used for cutting, digging and butchering animal carcasses.
Amongst this anthropological treasure trove, we bought an Afro comb dated 1910-1930 and added it to the pile of modern birthday gifts purchased from the increasingly Christmassy department stores of Oxford Street.It was pure coincidence that T and I found ourselves motoring through Flanders fields a week before Remembrance Sunday.
It was her birthday so we were on our way to the beautiful Belgian city of Bruges (or Brugge, in the local language; which is, rather confusingly, Dutch).
The city—much loved by tourists for its perfectly preserved 17th century architecture—is just a three-hour drive from Paris. We drove through the Somme, where the blood-red poppies grow wild, now symbolic of the dead of both world wars.
November 11 (the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, 1918, when the guns fell silent and the Armistice was signed) is a public holiday in France and Belgium.
In England, Remembrance Sunday is marked with sombre wreath-laying and salutes at the Cenotaph war memorial on Whitehall.
No war better demonstrates the futility of conflict than the Great War. It involved 60 million people and killed ten million servicemen and women—obliterating a significant proportion of an entire generation, some conscripted straight after leaving school or university.
It isn’t taught much in the Caribbean—European history having been replaced with Caribbean history in schools. It seems to me that a reminder of the barbarity that colonial Europeans did to each other, as well as to the Caribbean, wouldn’t go amiss.
The oldest surviving veteran of WWI died in 2012. Florence Green, who served in the Royal Air Force, was 110. Harry Patch, the longest surviving soldier to have died in those appalling trenches, died aged 111, in 2009. Having kept silent about the war for decades, he finally broke his silence when he turned 100, as though becoming a centenarian finally entitled him to speak.
He described the war as “organised mass murder” and England and Germany as two dogs fighting for their lives like savages.
One soldier who spoke out during the war was the poet Siegfried Sassoon. His poem Suicide In The Trenches is an enduring wound that brought home the reality of the horror.
“I knew a simple soldier boy who grinned at life in empty joy. Slept soundly through the lonesome dark and whistled early with the lark. In winter trenches, cowed and glum, With crumps and lice and lack of rum, He put a bullet through his brain. No one spoke of him again. You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye who cheer when soldier lads march by. Sneak home and pray you’ll never know the hell where youth and laughter go.”
In London, just before our Flanders excursion, I spent a week working the night shift as news reporter for London’s Evening Standard newspaper. At times I felt more like a detective than a journalist.
At the editor’s whim I door-stepped the Duke of Buccleuch’s neighbours to “get them to complain” about the “mega basement” being built under his South Kensington mansion; I traced a Sri Lankan divorcee awarded £750,000 in a settlement from her abusive millionaire husband to a refuge in Streatham Common.
And I revealed the identity of a Portuguese delivery man who died on his scooter in a road accident within sight of Stratford’s Olympic Stadium. When one editor tried to persuade me to obtain the dead man’s mobile phone number and his widow’s address I realised the tabloid journo life was not for me.
On the Kings Road in Chelsea (London’s wealthiest neighbourhood) I bought a poppy off a Chelsea pensioner (the red-coated retired soldiers housed at the nearby barracks.)
He had recently moved down to London from Leeds at the army’s invitation after his wife died. He knew nothing about the local disquiet over plans to build a £1bn train station as part of the £28bn Crossrail 2 project.
A small Italian boy asked him where he got all his medals and he began saying, “Malaya...” but the boy, perhaps suffering from ADD, cried out “whaa? whaaa?!” then grew disinterested.
Within an hour I realised my poppy had disintegrated and fallen off.
In medieval Bruges, we strolled the picturesque bridges and cobbled streets between canals and horse-drawn carts.
In the backstreets, away from the crowds, we made a superb discovery. An antique dealer with some astonishing African artefacts; mostly Congolese.
A huge wooden chiselled stick in a holder that villagers grind in a circular motion when trying to make a decision until it stops turning and the spirits have given the answer. Small weights in the shape of crocodiles and turtles from the border of Ghana and Ivory Coast, used to measure gold powder. Axes representing status. Scarification blades.
Arrowheads for short spears. A “bell” (more like a rattle) inside a leather pouch worn on the waist to let people know your location. And prehistoric flint “axe head” tools from the Neolithic and stone age periods used for cutting, digging and butchering animal carcasses.
Amongst this anthropological treasure trove, we bought an Afro comb dated 1910-1930 and added it to the pile of modern birthday gifts purchased from the increasingly Christmassy department stores of Oxford Street.It was pure coincidence that T and I found ourselves motoring through Flanders fields a week before Remembrance Sunday.
It was her birthday so we were on our way to the beautiful Belgian city of Bruges (or Brugge, in the local language; which is, rather confusingly, Dutch).
The city—much loved by tourists for its perfectly preserved 17th century architecture—is just a three-hour drive from Paris. We drove through the Somme, where the blood-red poppies grow wild, now symbolic of the dead of both world wars.
November 11 (the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, 1918, when the guns fell silent and the Armistice was signed) is a public holiday in France and Belgium.
In England, Remembrance Sunday is marked with sombre wreath-laying and salutes at the Cenotaph war memorial on Whitehall.
No war better demonstrates the futility of conflict than the Great War. It involved 60 million people and killed ten million servicemen and women—obliterating a significant proportion of an entire generation, some conscripted straight after leaving school or university.
It isn’t taught much in the Caribbean—European history having been replaced with Caribbean history in schools. It seems to me that a reminder of the barbarity that colonial Europeans did to each other, as well as to the Caribbean, wouldn’t go amiss.
The oldest surviving veteran of WWI died in 2012. Florence Green, who served in the Royal Air Force, was 110. Harry Patch, the longest surviving soldier to have died in those appalling trenches, died aged 111, in 2009. Having kept silent about the war for decades, he finally broke his silence when he turned 100, as though becoming a centenarian finally entitled him to speak.
He described the war as “organised mass murder” and England and Germany as two dogs fighting for their lives like savages.
One soldier who spoke out during the war was the poet Siegfried Sassoon. His poem Suicide In The Trenches is an enduring wound that brought home the reality of the horror.
“I knew a simple soldier boy who grinned at life in empty joy. Slept soundly through the lonesome dark and whistled early with the lark. In winter trenches, cowed and glum, With crumps and lice and lack of rum, He put a bullet through his brain. No one spoke of him again. You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye who cheer when soldier lads march by. Sneak home and pray you’ll never know the hell where youth and laughter go.”
In London, just before our Flanders excursion, I spent a week working the night shift as news reporter for London’s Evening Standard newspaper. At times I felt more like a detective than a journalist.
At the editor’s whim I door-stepped the Duke of Buccleuch’s neighbours to “get them to complain” about the “mega basement” being built under his South Kensington mansion; I traced a Sri Lankan divorcee awarded £750,000 in a settlement from her abusive millionaire husband to a refuge in Streatham Common.
And I revealed the identity of a Portuguese delivery man who died on his scooter in a road accident within sight of Stratford’s Olympic Stadium. When one editor tried to persuade me to obtain the dead man’s mobile phone number and his widow’s address I realised the tabloid journo life was not for me.
On the Kings Road in Chelsea (London’s wealthiest neighbourhood) I bought a poppy off a Chelsea pensioner (the red-coated retired soldiers housed at the nearby barracks.)
He had recently moved down to London from Leeds at the army’s invitation after his wife died. He knew nothing about the local disquiet over plans to build a £1bn train station as part of the £28bn Crossrail 2 project.
A small Italian boy asked him where he got all his medals and he began saying, “Malaya...” but the boy, perhaps suffering from ADD, cried out “whaa? whaaa?!” then grew disinterested.
Within an hour I realised my poppy had disintegrated and fallen off.
In medieval Bruges, we strolled the picturesque bridges and cobbled streets between canals and horse-drawn carts.
In the backstreets, away from the crowds, we made a superb discovery. An antique dealer with some astonishing African artefacts; mostly Congolese.
A huge wooden chiselled stick in a holder that villagers grind in a circular motion when trying to make a decision until it stops turning and the spirits have given the answer. Small weights in the shape of crocodiles and turtles from the border of Ghana and Ivory Coast, used to measure gold powder. Axes representing status. Scarification blades.
Arrowheads for short spears. A “bell” (more like a rattle) inside a leather pouch worn on the waist to let people know your location. And prehistoric flint “axe head” tools from the Neolithic and stone age periods used for cutting, digging and butchering animal carcasses.
Amongst this anthropological treasure trove, we bought an Afro comb dated 1910-1930 and added it to the pile of modern birthday gifts purchased from the increasingly Christmassy department stores of Oxford Street.
