This year is the 100th anniversary of the start of The Great War and the 70th anniversary of the Normandy invasion. Last week’s commemorations were special for a number of reasons, not least because it is absolutely right that we remember those who really did give so much to ensure that we have freedom and democracy in our country.
My father served in the Royal Navy during the war – he was 21 the day war was declared – and was involved in the Normandy landings. When I was growing up he would tell me about the war as it affected him. To me, as a child, it seemed ancient history and of course my impression was coloured and influenced by war movies that did not necessarily convey the utter horror of war in a way that films can do now. The fact that the war was just twenty or thirty years earlier was lost on me.
Now I am fifty one years old and I have had a chance to live my life, marry, have and raise a family, work at my career, enjoy my hobbies and all the stuff that most of us do. Part of this is having and realising dreams and ambitions that we all have. So it becomes even more poignant looking at the films of the Normandy Landings that the act of war deprived so many people in their youth of enjoying all that I and my generation have enjoyed simply by being given the chance get on with our lives without having to fight. The story of my grandfather’s brother is even sadder. He was twenty four at the outbreak of the Great War, but was already in the army. We still have his photograph album and there is a section titled “The Great War: 1914 to 1915”. He could not possibly have known that the Great War would go on three years longer, and that he would be dead by the end of January 1916.
The House of Commons was bombed during WWII. After the war, it was rebuilt and restored. The Chamber and Members’ Lobby were destroyed and so completely rebuilt. Winston Churchill, overseeing the restoration, ordered that the stone arch between the two rooms, leading into the Chamber, be rebuilt from the damaged and scared stones of the original. He did this to permanently remind MPs of the utter futility of war.