November 11th

Interior, Sue Ryder second-hand

clothes shop, Katelijnestraat.

A busy week doing the usual plus! So a whole Sunday morning a week ago, notionally exchanging summer clothes for the winter clothes stored away. Actually, this year unusually, I had to try on everything to discover the suspected truth. Either through Belgian beer or advanced age, there is a Widening Girth to be dealt with. I won’t bore with details but I filled two large bags of clothes for the Sue Ryder charity shop AND repaired to see Mustafa from an Afghan tailoring family [living for years in Brugge via Sweden!] He has a little shop for alterations to clothes, on the Gentpoortstraat and he is brilliant! I hope to collect the three pairs of trousers in another week or so and I am trying to feel, not outraged at the widening, but instead, Virtuously Green in my extending the lives of some clothes while providing work for a skilled craftsman. 

• I write as the bells ring out all over Britain in memoriam; it is November 11 and I have listened to Radio Four commentary on the huge, deeply-felt and stirring ceremonial parade at the Cenotaph in London. Each time I have tuned in, there have been memories expressed by an interesting range of people. Survivors of WW2; sixteen year olds, solemn in their idealistic hopes for world peace in the future; proud family members with their stories of grand-parents’ experiences in both World Wars; survivors of the London Blitz; memories from VE Day around the UK. And then there are the painful facts, remembered, of men killed just before
  

  

  "In Flanders fields, the poppies grow …"

  the Armistice, like Wilfred Owen, the famous war poet, who fell leading an attack on the Sambre-Oise canal on November 4, 1918. I have worn a poppy as usual for the last two weeks, purchased from a nearby hotel with an English owner; poppy-wearing doesn’t seem to be a custom here and I was surprised to read somewhere that the flower for French remembrance is le bleuet, the cornflower; never before suspected. I have always, till now, assumed the poppy was a universal [in Europe] symbol of remembrance. The splendid museum in Ypres Cloth Hall is called Flanders Fields.

But there is much emotion here on the one hundredth anniversary of the end of the first world war and surely, hardly a family in Flanders without a painful WW1 narrative of relatives and events long gone. I peeked into the family What’s App this morning, surprised to discover a sepia photograph of my grandsons’ maternal great grandfather in his WW1 army uniform and a few details of his life including the information that he had a dog called Poppy. And I remember, perhaps twenty years ago, setting off with my husband [himself a pilot survivor of WW2] to find Canada Green Cemetery near Poperinge, where he had obtained details of the grave of an uncle, killed in 1917 two years before
Eric had been born. And I had left him in peace at the grave, to weep

In the meantime, while Europe is awash with emotion over this centenary, nationalism, anti-Semitism, anti-immigrant sentiment and right-wing demagoguery are springing up like poisonous mushrooms all over Europe and the U.S.

Cloth Hall, Ieper: re-built and restored 1933-1967

Originally completed 1304

The Last Post

But to end on a positive note! Tonight to the Sportsman Bar in Langemark with friends to the poignant ceremony at the Welsh Memorial [written about in a recent blog.] A lovely, friendly evening with Belgians of course, but also English and Welsh. Outside in the dark were braziers with logs burning and

torches to illuminate the site with perhaps fifty people participating. Feelings were near the surface. A bagpipe was played; trumpets sounded; a few readings and a tribute to one fallen soldier was read. Later came the Last Post, haunting as ever and especially poignant in this little corner of Flanders which saw seemingly endless years of mud, trenches, guns and tears. Inside the warm bar with the beer, wine and coffees, friendships blossomed or were renewed, bonhomie reigned and the ghosts of the fallen from those distant battles were still.

Cloth Hall, Ypres 1918