We went by Lyme Regis’s parish church at half past midday, but the bells were not changing from muffled to celebratory tone, indeed they were already silent. Seems things did not go quite as the Central Council of Church Bellringers planned back in August.
However, there was more to happen. Lyme was one of thirty coastal towns staging an event called “Pages of the Sea”: figures made by raking the sand, later to be photographed from the air and shown on television. Kids from Woodroffe school were pegging the outline of the main figure, representing a first-world-war casualty.
It was a day of what Tilly called bipolar weather, and the backdrop to the scene was a sumptuous cloud.
Above the cloud you can discern a crepuscular ray from the hidden sun; below, a shaft of rain. When the a shower was going away to the northeast–
A double rainbow. What more could you ask as a signal for the end of war?
And a bird, above that cloud, just caught in the frame at top right. It was probably a passing gull, but it just might have been a dove?
By two in the afternoon, the large figure on the beach was complete, if not entirely decipherable,
as well as a long double row of smaller figures made with stencils,
all soon to be erased by the in-coming tide.
And on the overlooking jetty, a man and a boy were putting wood into a brazier, which was to go up in flame at seven in the evening – one of a hundred beacons to be lighted all over the country.
This beach is like the stage of a theatre, because behind it rise walkways and a grassy slope. So a crowd of hundreds was gathered here, listening to a long series of speakers reading poems or meditations related to the 1914-18 war. I had not put down my name to be part of this, but I went around to behind the M.C. and asked her whether I could contribute a poem: it would be only three words. She took the risk of letting me, though I had to wait through half a dozen more recitations to the end. Then I went to the podium and indited my three words, which were the names of my mother’s three brothers, all older than her and all casualties of that war.
Vernon.
Eric.
Noel.
We were, our family, so very fortunate to visit the battlefields of the First World War with an accomplished, passionate and knowledgeable teacher, a sensei, who brought our bus to a slow halt from a sojourn and noted the oldest standing structure in this little French town in Champagne, dating from 1916, a house that survived the hell of that war.
I was fortunate, a few days ago to share and pass that hard earned knowledge to two youth selling poppies for us vets. Poppies
As the world teeters on the brink of another calamity born of greed, hatred, and hubris, I hope we’re all hearing the echoes of the first world war.
Guy, this was very moving. The First World War seems so much more distant here. Roland has said before that his awareness of your uncles’ deaths in the war made a real impact on him as a child, and he was brought to tears when he showed me your post.