The Roundup - Edition 81

A message from 
Rich Jones, Head.

I have been asked by a couple of parents to send over the Senior School Remembrance Morning Talk from Monday. 

Yesterday was Remembrance Sunday, and all across the country there were services of remembrance and minutes of silence to think about those who sacrificed their lives in armed conflict.

As I stand in front of you today, I imagine there is virtually no one sitting here whose family haven’t been impacted directly by armed conflict. In a school of five hundred young people from 17 different nationalities, it is almost impossible to find a single family untouched by war. Whether through grandparents who fought, parents who lived through displacement, or relatives who lived under conflict, stories of courage, loss and survival are closer than we might think.

Over the past hundred years, no region has been immune from the effects of war.

In exploring remembrance in schools, it’s often highlighted that children and families beyond the frontline are impacted too; by evacuation, by being separated, by fear and by rebuilding afterwards. These ripple effects matter just as much as the frontline stories.

It is the same in my family. I remember, as a young boy, listening to stories that my grandparents would tell about being at war, about what the impact was and what it felt like. At the time I found it all very exciting… however frequently my Grandfather Tom would stop talking when my brothers and I asked questions and would simply wander off into the garden and stay there. My Grandmother would tell us to leave him be. She said, he did that a lot and its best to let him be by himself. 

As I got older, my conversations with Tom deepened. He told me about how much fun he had in some ways: how many good, close friends he made, the countries he got to see and the exciting experiences he had. But he also reminded me that he watched many of those friends die, painfully and needlessly. Tom married my Grandma six weeks before he left for war. He didn’t see her for four years. Imagine that. He was just twenty-four when he left. She was also a casualty of war.

Tom told me once, near the end of his life, about the time he was in North Africa on sentry duty and patrol. He and his two pals were nervous; they knew a new Nazi attack was imminent. Suddenly, at three in the morning, they saw movement on the ridge closest to them: shadows moving quickly across. They did as they were trained and opened fire on those shadows. 

Nothing else happened that night, and the following day the three of them climbed up to the ridge to see if there was anything there. Sadly, there was. There was a shepherd lying dead on the ridge, about the same age as my grandfather was then – perhaps younger, "probably younger" Tom said looking into the distance. He told me he still dreamed of that shepherd, of that decision they took and the body he discovered on that day. He was twenty-seven when it happened, and he was still dreaming about it when he was seventy-six.

That story will make no film, no documentary, no history book. It is just a minor story within a minor moment in a small part of the conflict. Yet the impact for each of them, and for many, was enormous.

We often hear about trench warfare, cavalry charges and heroism. What we don’t always hear as much about is the ordinary and the extraordinary lived side by side. The quiet decisions, the small acts of humanity, the lasting scars.

Everyone has a story. Everyone has an experience in their family. Our job today is to remember. To think about those stories. And to not let them, or their sacrifices, fade.

We will now have our silence.