Poppies. Credit http://www.sxc.hu/profile/micromoth
I watched the BBC’s My Family at War tonight, of which there is a series running all week. It was about Rolf Harris and Kirsty Wark as they traced their ancestor’s steps in Northern France. I believe my great grandfather John Balfour served in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in the Somme.
In the show which will be available on iPlayer tomorrowThe show which you can watch here, Harris talks about how his father never talked of the war. My great grandfather died when I was about 15 and I was told he’d never talked about his experience.
The closest I ever heard was when we went to France in the heatwave year of 1995 (or was it 1996?) he was shocked and appalled that we would want to go to such a horrific place. Harris, via War Records, found that his father’s tin hat (which had a shrapnel mark in the skull) did not show a glancing blow, but a wound which nearly ended his life. He saw the horrors that were caused by the huge underground explosions which helped break the trench warfare, at the cost of 10s of thousands of young lives in an instant.