this is not a festival !

going to church with mother on Remembrance Sunday

                My mum Janet alexander nee Cameron is a proud Christian woman very aware of her history and place in her society, she loves her Sunday at church and at 82 years old is still a singer in the choir , this Sunday 11/11/2018 is a special remembrance service at her church it will be exactly 100 years since the signing of the armistice ending the first world war at 11 am on the 11^th day of the 11^th month 1918 , the so called war to end all wars after a terrible loss of life what came to be known as the great war had ended , it’s my opinion there was nothing great about it  I’m not a religious man and I would like to think any god worth worshipping had nothing to do with this death and destruction on an industrial scale  ,but my mum has asked me to join her at this special service because her church has put a lot of work into making it a special service of remembrance for local people who have been affected by war over the years , mum along with others from the congregation have been knitting red poppies for the church garden and pulpit and the minister has made a slide show of items and photographs to remember members of the church the impact that wars have had on our community , I have agreed to go along and will be joined by my son Cameron who was christened in this church while a baby, his parents were married at this church and both sets of his grandparents are church members , my hope was that this service would be a sad affair reflecting on the futileness and waste of life that all these wars were and not a celebration of death and destruction on industrial scale , I haven’t 100% worked out in my head how we should go about a day of remembrance for our military , I was fortunate to be in Melbourne Australia for there remembrance day once a long time ago and it was a big day of celebration with a parade with bands and the crowds cheering and clapping serving military personnel as they marched past on their way to lay wreaths at the cenotaph then all the bars were filled with people some in uniform and some not having beers afterward , it was a far cry from the sombre sad type of remembrance Sundays we have here in the UK ,

                Mums life has been affected a lot by wars her father my grandfather Arthur Cameron was born in 1899 and was only 15 when the first world war broke out , he was cleaning his granny`s windows and was a stocky young lad of 15 when a woman in the street had seen him from the back thinking him to be a coward she posted a white feather through his granny’s door , when my grandfather seen this sign of cowardice aimed at him, he went right down to the recruitment office and signed up lying about his age , ! I bet he wouldn’t have got a pint at his local pub at 15 but the ridiculous recruitment office accepted his lie of being 18 and sent him off to the front in the royal artillery , there cannot have been many people who would have seen the front lines of Ypres Passchendaele and the Somme , he did while taking guns up to the front lines being blown of his horse on occasion by landing shells , thankfully he survived or mum wouldn’t have been born and I wouldn’t have been here either , sadly his brother mums uncle Kenneth Cameron was killed in the next so called great war he was killed at Tobruk and is buried in Egypt. Mum still has a silk handkerchief she has off his ,Thankfully they had moved away from her birth town of port Glasgow as the streets that she played in as a child were severely bombed by the Germans during world war 2,
her brother Kenneth and sister Helen were buried through there they died as infants of whooping cough and my papa had carved their tombstone himself during the Clydeside depression, she was pre-teens during the second world war where her sister was an sergeant in the air core plotting the fighter planes going in and out around grangemouths air base protecting the docks and rail bridge , her sister my aunt Kate was dating one of the fighter pilots whom mum liked and when he returned from sorties he would fly past where they lived and waggle his wing tips to let Kate know it was him and also my mum knew this so she would watch for him , one day a plane came over and its wings waggled she thought it was him but it was in fact a German plane that the local spitfires had hit and it was flying out of control and cashed into the fields near mums house , aunt Kate never did marry that pilot she married uncle Laurence instead who had been torpedoed 3 times while serving with the navy during the war
, mums other uncle her dads brother Robert Cameron I am led to believe was Montgomery’s cartographer but mum has limited memory of this as she was only 6 and she at 81 years old now is the only one of that generation alive now, with not only her parents aunts and uncles gone but also her older cousins and siblings all gone,  she did have a photograph of him in his uniform posing on a box, but he became an artist after the war and moved to Cornwall to paint for a living when she was still young   

       

         Mums husband my dad also served but it was after the great wars the only guns he handled during world war two was a captured German luger pistol he stole out a railway carriage at grangemouth docks as a boy, he done his national service in the black watch and was sent to Africa to fight The Mau Mau rebels in Kenya. he was a big lad and had the job of being the Bren gunner on patrols in the forests of the Kenyan highlands ,I believe my dad’s dad was at Dunkirk with the engineer corp but I can’t be certain of that as neither of them are around now to ask so there stories have sadly died with them,  mums son my brother Bryan joined the royal marines while only 17 his papa grabbed him by the arm and said to him remember son there’s no glory in war just before my brother went off to see front line action on the successful attack on mount Harriet in the Falkland’s where he was only 18 and crawling through minefields under machinegun fire,as a family at home I was only 15 at the time and sat with the rest of my family glued to the news every night in the hope of catching some news of my brother, war was now being televised we only had 3 TV channels to watch but we would watch all the news we could especially mum and dad ,  , he also went on to patrol Belfast during the troubles , his stories of his time in the marines are fascinating all of them from being part of ships detachment on HMS Yarmouth to his patrols of the Russian border of Norway on skis during winter  ,              War and the military still play a part in mums’ life even yet as she now has grandchildren in the military with two grandsons serving submariners and another grandson having done his time in the RAF

        

        I am taking this time to reflect on all this military history of my family and its making me sad to think that with my dad now dead I cannot ask him about his time and my papa and grandad died when I was young aunt Kate is gone and with their parting all the stories of their time in the military of the suffering they had witnessed I can only now imagine , but I am grateful to them all for the part they have played in maintaining freedom of speech and civil liberties , hopefully our species will remember their loss and try much harder to end all wars

         Thankfully my mate Gary had brought me round a gift a hand painted envelope which contained a poppy and two metal poppy badges one for me with royal marines on it the other for Cameron , he had wrote a pleasant pun on the front of the envelope LEST YOU FORGET he knew we were going to church with mum and wanted to be sure I had my poppy on what a very nice gesture which I appreciated greatly , the wearing of the puppy itself is something that I do ponder sometimes and this year while walking past a peace shop in Edinburgh there was a sign in the window saying they sold white poppies I thought I am going to buy one as I am a peace loving person who would love to see all wars end , on my approach to the shop I noticed the shop assistant was wearing a green t shirt with free Palestine written in white ! I stopped in my track this shop wasn’t promoting peace he was just shouting for one side or another not at all part of the solution but part of the problem in my book, so that was that no white poppy for me maybe I should have bought a purple one for the horse that died between my papas’ legs while he was blown to safety

         

       We passed Gary on route to mums church he was marching to polmont church to pay his respects so we hijacked him for mums church, on arrival mum pointed out all the poppies the stitchers had knitted and put in the church garden attached to knitting needles and were given some knitted poppies to wear made by the church members stitchers group , there was a table out displaying some memorabilia from local families first world war relatives and my papas pay book was on display with his war will in the pay book the writing was very faded which you would expect at over 100 year old !

      

          We took our seats at the back trying to be sure we never took anyone’s spot I was impressed with the church screen near the pulpit and the stitchers had covered the pulpit in red knitted poppies with a white cross at the centre knitted from white poppies 1918-2018 , the slide show was good with lots of local pictures of church members relatives from the first world war , which is what most of the sermon was about , other wars were mentioned but the slides and photographs were nearly all from the first world war , I was impressed that the hymn words came up on the slide show not that mum and the other choir members looked they all still used their hymn books  

                It was a strange mix of memories and thoughts for me its now a female minister that would have been unthinkable in my youth she was helped by an Indian minister and there seemed a lot more focus on love and kindness as opposed to the fire and brimstone I remember from my youth! different interpretations of the same books I suppose. there was scouts in along with the boys brigade also the girl guides and Sunday school children , when I was young the scouts were with the chapel we boys brigade had to attend church of Scotland , the minuets silence was followed by a laying of a wreath at the role call of the locals that had fell in the first war and their names rank and regiment were read out by church elders ,then there was another prayer which we ended with the lords prayer which of course is still imprinted on my brain from school ,  they rounded of the sermon with a reading from the bible by the Indian minister and then all sang the national anthem , which me Cammy and Gary being nationalist were surprised with but shouldn’t have been I suppose , we were there to show our respects for our fallen predecessors who laid down their lives for a brighter future for all democracy and freedom , not for king and country or a god they feared more than the German guns ,but hey that’s just my opinion many of them were batting for their sovereign without a vote and no knowledge of democracy as you had to own land to vote during that era   ,

                   With The church service now finished mum shouted me over to the choir she was going for a cup of tea if we wanted to walk up to the cenotaph she would get us there after her tea with the choir and minister , I took Cameron into the backroom where I was hoping I could show him his name was painted on the church walls cradle roll from his christening , but it has been recently removed due to data protection laws ! when we got outside the rain was lashing down I was not keen to go along to the war memorial mum calls it the cenotaph

Cenotaph means 'empty tomb'. It symbolises the unprecedented losses suffered during the First World War and is dedicated to 'The Glorious Dead'. There are no names inscribed on the Cenotaph, which allowed individuals to assign their own meaning to the memorial, the one in grangemouth has names on it

          We opted instead to walk along past many of grangemouths now closed churches and go for a pint at the earl of Zetland a former church and now a pub(very apt for this day i felt) which sells a selection of ales, here we could raise a glass to the fallen and felt we had paid our respects on this occasion very thankful we live in the age we do