Remembrance

Earlier this week I placed a small cross with a poppy for Wokingham in the Parliamentary garden of remembrance. Today I will lay wreaths at two local Memorial services. It is right that we remember all those who gave their lives in the two great world wars of the last century, and in other recent conflicts.

Born like most people alive today after the  wars, I recall how  they did shape the lives of every family in the land. My two grandfathers fought as very young men in the trenches of Northern France and Belgium in the first war. My mother and father met through their naval duties in the second war. Both generations had years dominated by death, injury and deprivation all around them.  They lost friends and comrades, worried about the bombing of their family  homes and accepted the obligations of rationing and black outs.

I felt very privileged to be born into a UK  at last at peace, free of ration books  and visibly getting more prosperous as the bomb damage was replaced with new shops and homes. I  wished to work to keep it that way. I feel a great debt of gratitude that the lives of more recent generations including my own has been spared living under a foreign imposed tyranny of the kind Hitler and Nazi Germany  imposed on much of Europe at the peak of his powers.

It is right that we keep a silence and say a thank you to all those who gave their today that we might enjoy a better tomorrow.