24-04-2022, 09:29 AM
Kiwimade, I have a great uncle, My grandmother's beloved older brother Jack Dagg on that wall too. Too high up for me to reach to give him a poppy, but every visit to the museum I used to go say hello for her, because she mourned him all her life. She told me stories of him, and he lived on through those stories, just as all our forebears seem to do. I doubt though our younger family members have any idea of the life of young Jack, his talents, the way he was loved, even that he went to war and became one of those kiwis on foreign soil.
Until they do a family tree in their later years that is! Funny how those connections start to matter as we age. I do have hopes though that my beautiful grandson will carry the memory of my father, along with his name, forward into the future. He apparently has a real interest in his military career so I sent him the medals, and the Commission document signed by George VI and the photos in the Korean trenches, so maybe that will go forward, a kind of immortality achieved. For as long as he is remembered. Anzac Day for me though means recalling my father's nightmares, the phosphorous burns down his back, his nausea and revulsion at the smell of roasting pork, and our troubled relationship that rose from his absence for the first three years of my life, while he was away in that conflict. And when I see 'his' guns, the ones that stand on the forecourt of the museum, the ones he lifted me to sit on as a tiny child, that is Anzac Day for me. Then I 'remember them', and wish all our poppies, past and future, could be white ones.
Until they do a family tree in their later years that is! Funny how those connections start to matter as we age. I do have hopes though that my beautiful grandson will carry the memory of my father, along with his name, forward into the future. He apparently has a real interest in his military career so I sent him the medals, and the Commission document signed by George VI and the photos in the Korean trenches, so maybe that will go forward, a kind of immortality achieved. For as long as he is remembered. Anzac Day for me though means recalling my father's nightmares, the phosphorous burns down his back, his nausea and revulsion at the smell of roasting pork, and our troubled relationship that rose from his absence for the first three years of my life, while he was away in that conflict. And when I see 'his' guns, the ones that stand on the forecourt of the museum, the ones he lifted me to sit on as a tiny child, that is Anzac Day for me. Then I 'remember them', and wish all our poppies, past and future, could be white ones.