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Interior, Sue Ryder second-hand
clothes shop, Katelijnestraat.
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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
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.
"In Flanders fields, the poppies grow …"
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
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.
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Cloth Hall, Ieper: re-built and restored 1933-1967
Originally completed 1304
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| The Last Post |
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.
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| Cloth Hall, Ypres 1918 |
