I can bear anything, I’ll go away to a home to have my baby, I won’t bring a scandal, I’ll raise him right – I hope it’s a son Roddy, I hope he grows up into a good man like you – I’ll bear whatever people want to throw at me.
If only you’ll keep safe Roddy. Please, Roddy. Just keep yourself safe and come back.
Your loving Ruby
xx
Jill Dawson
Ely, Writer
I think there were a lot of women who suffered in silence about losses because they weren’t recognised as girlfriends, wives or mothers, because their hearts contained secrets. Women who couldn’t mourn openly. I think someone I know – now ninety-two – is one such woman. I wanted to write a letter from her.
Dear Unknown Soldier
What a stupid statement. I know exactly who you are. So if I know you, then you cannot be unknown – well not to me anyway.
I never met you. You had gone to fight in that terrible, terrible war many years before I was born, but that doesn’t make any difference.
I grew up knowing that you – my great-uncle – had died in Belgium, fighting over some unpronounceable woods, and that you had been ‘killed in action’, at least that is what the telegram said. A telegram that my grandmother, your sister, took from the ashen-faced telegram boy.
‘Killed in action’ the telegram said, but what it didn’t say was that you had probably been atomised. There was no recognisable trace of you left to bury. No grave for us, your family, to mourn over.
Yes I know your name is on a wall, which is on a panel and which makes up the focus of remembrance that is the Menin Gate, in Ypres.
The Menin Gate – the British Memorial to the Missing – and you are not alone.
Alongside you are the names of 54,338 other poor souls who like you, ‘have no known grave’.
I like to think, as I stand below your name, that you are aware of who I am and that I am there on behalf of the rest of your family.
Your family. Did you know that your mother, father and youngest sister Ethel had travelled to Belgium in 1928, as pilgrims on the then ‘British Legion Pilgrimage’? They had stood beneath the same panel that I have. Did their tears make you weep?
I’ve often wondered whether even for the briefest of moments, you could have left your panel and wrapped your arms around them. A family, together again.
Your mother never got over your death. Her grief was absolute. The love your mother had for you and the spectre of grief that had wrapped itself around her, escorted her to the grave.
How cruel is fate? I truly hope that you were aware that your father departed this life on September 29th 1938 – twenty years to the day that you departed. How symbolic was that.
As I write this, I am looking at a photo of you, taken when you were a young man; a young man who seemed full of life and yet who was to have that life cruelly taken from him – and us.
I freely admit that the statue of the unknown soldier doesn’t look very much like your photograph, BUT IF I WANT TO BELIEVE THAT IT IS YOU, THEN THAT’S WHAT I’M GOING TO BELIEVE!
Until I write again, I’ll leave you with the final line from one verse of the hymn, ‘Jesus, Lover Of My Soul’:
‘Safe into the haven guide; O receive my soul at last.’
God Bless You
Your Great-Nephew
Gareth Scourfield
67, Caerphilly, Royal British Legion and The Western Front Association, Retired
This letter is my chance to write to my great-uncle, who was Killed in Action in September 1918.
Brave soldier, perpetual myth:
The sacrifice slaughtered on
politician altars and citizens
needing a quick idol. ‘Look
how much better – look
how much worse –’ You,
soldier martyr and Saint
Patriot, named but by your
nation and known but by your
cliché: You journey forth bold
and confident (how else would
you go?), and die a death
cinematically heroic. Fears
dismissed, doubts diminished –
And have I said it yet?
Thank you for dying.
Thank you for dying.
Have you heard about the Xbox?
Thank you for dying.
Thank you for dying.
Take it on assurance, this
is how you wanted it – death
made meaningful in strangers’
memories (and maybe it’s
true, maybe we do preserve
you in fleeting thoughts meshed
between ‘I’m hungry’ and ‘Hey,
there’s McDonald’s’). But
when ‘sacrifice’ is pandered
beside ‘LOL’ and ‘like’ and the next
Big Issue, does the word not
lose its value? Cheap and rendered
meaningless in repetition – And have I
mentioned you must be handsome,
strong, and honourable; what other
kind of soldier is there? And maybe
you are that way, maybe –
You are that soldier’s ancestor, the one
who talked the woman and kids trapped
in their house through eight hours of Taliban
shooting, the soldier who would not
let her hang up and face it
alone. But maybe you weren’t, maybe –
you are more like those who say
they would shoot any Afghan;
who cares if she’s pregnant?
Maybe you swear and drink
and women fight instead of fancy
you. Is it blasphemy to say:
One does not become a hero
simply by having died?
Unknown but claimed by everyone,
you’ve lost your identity, sir,
it belongs to us, sir, to make
not into a mirror
but a manipulation. You
are mine to say ‘noble.’ You
are mine to say ‘tool.’ You
are mine to say ‘hero.’ You
are mine to say ‘waste.’ You
have no voice. You
have no memory. You