Monday 9 December 2013

Blood Swept Lands & Seas of Red



The Banker Pub

On a gorgeous day in August I met my dear friend Janet for lunch in a rather nice pub called The Bankers. It overlooks the River Thames, very close to the Tower of London. So, after a prettily dressed salad and a glass of lightly chilled white wine  (at a price that would make your Auntie scream), we nattered on about families, funerals and fallopian tubes. Then we strolled over to view the latest artwork.

It was a sculpture of ceramic poppies that erupted out of a window of the Tower. We thought it very pretty, and a fitting tribute to the lost soldiers of World War I.  What we didn't realise at the time was that the poppy installation wasn't finished. Day by day, week by week, month by relentless month, a team of 8,000 volunteers have planted 888,246 beautifully crafted flowers, one for each life lost during those years in the trenches, 1914-1918. 

The Poppies, August 2014
This morning I returned to the City of London in the early morning and sat writing at the bottom of the Monument, built to commemorate an earlier London disaster - the  Fire 1665. The Monument's a peaceful place now if you catch it before the rest of the crowds. I'd been having such trouble with my current chapter, trying to write about my hero's experience of war though I was born in peacetime. Eventually I thought I'd wrestled some sort of result after a short, furious bout of the scribbles.


The Poppies, November 2014
 Ten minutes later, quite unprepared for what I'd encounter, I took a brisk walk in the rain to the Tower. The poppies now are waist height. They fill the moat, right up to the railings. They spray across the bridge and surge along the river side in full view of the Thames River Police, the dredgers and the HMS Belfast. In 1914 there were many who thought the war would be a bit of a diversion, 'over by Christmas'. Now their descendants stand, literally thousands of them, every age group, every social class, in hushed silence at 8.00 am in the morning. There were so many people there that they closed first Tower Hill station, then Aldgate, then St Paul's. Still the crowds came flocking, stomping along the Thames path with their prams, umbrellas and walking sticks. Eerie, and unforgettable. Now there's a fitting tribute.


With rue my heart is laden
  For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
  And many a lightfoot lad.

A. E. Housman
1859-1936 

My short story published by Ether Books, Free today for Remembrance Sunday 

 Click Here


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