At 10.45 AM, the family all trooped up the hill to what is known as the Cross, the heart of our village of Holt near Wrexham where the war memorial stands. My nine year old son Joshua knows about the World Wars and is, as I write, penning an essay plan for me on “for who was Dunkirk a disaster?” Even soon to be five Jaya is aware of something of our history as a nation and also as a family.
Great Uncle Francis died in Egypt on Boxing day 1942 from wounds suffered a month earlier. He is buried out East. Among those who did get to grow old, Great Uncle Peter Wood was a Spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain while Great Uncle Michael Booker went into France in 1944. From the first war, the Christmas Day 1914 account of great great uncle Douglas Winnifrith, an army chaplain, survives to this day – as you can see here.
And so we were, as a family, among those standing in silence by the cross. Maybe 5% of the village was there, perhaps a few more. In years gone by when those who had fought in either war were still among us in large numbers the two minutes silence really would have been two minutes silence marked by many more of the village. But not today. Not just for the two minutes from 11 AM but throughout a brief service cyclists and cars whizzed by.
It was not the silence of old. I know that in the unlikely event that I had been driving I would have pulled over at 11 AM not just for my own thoughts but so that there was no danger of disrespecting the dead and those who honoured the dead, with their silence. But most folks simply do not think that way any more.
It is no real surprise. The first world war is barely taught in our schools. Perhaps, en passant, they cover the treaty of Versailles as they start studying the Nazis but few ids have any idea of what caused the war and its sheer horrors. As for World War Two, again there is little teaching of the conflict, only en passant as they again discuss how wicked were the Nazis.
The Nazis were wicked. But so was Stalin, Britain’s ally after he switched sides and the Bosnian Muslim members of the SS, Banderite Ukrainians or Horvath’s Hungarians. Was there any point to the First war or was it a senseless slaughter? But we can’t discuss any of this with young folk, so uneducated that they might actually believe teachers who equate Reform UK with the actual Nazis.
As time goes on the sad truth is that fewer and fewer folks have any idea of the tragedy of both wars or of a British history in which we should feel some pride and of why we should respect all those who served. As each year goes by, I fear there will be fewer folks standing up at the Cross here in Holt and more folks speeding by in their cars, living for the present and themselves, listening to Greatest Hits Radio and not thinking about the past or of the sacrifice of others for even 120 seconds.