By Paul Flatt
November 13 2006

In a little piece last May, I described the last match of the season as my second favourite day of the Saints rugby calendar.

 

 

 

If I may, I’d now like to try and explain the swirl of emotions which makes the annual Act of Remembrance at Franklins Gardens the most memorable day each year, and why – for this one week only – the result really doesn’t seem to matter all that much. I’m just glad to be there enjoying the company of the living.

 

If you have time, wander along Billing Road and duck into that narrow road which runs between Northampton School for Boys and St Andrews Hospital and which runs down to the Sports Hall and the playing fields. At the end you will find a tired old inter-war sports pavilion. It’s not very impressive and it’s a bit tatty in comparison to the many new buildings which now grace the school.  But if you’re lucky, you’ll be there when the pavilion is open and you will discover that inside are lots of pictures of previous sporting members of the school, and on a wall a plaque will inform you that the pavilion is, in fact, a memorial to the school’s pupils and teachers who died in the Great War. Turn back to some of those photos on the wall – perhaps you may now wonder which ones survived and which never came back? I imagine that only their relatives now know.

 

Each year the same school holds a Remembrance Assembly and this year, like every recent year, a particular sports master – well known to many Northamptonshire representative rugby players – quietly cried during the assembly at the loss of the school’s pupils and his sporting forebears.

 

Cut now to a typical autumnal Saturday at Franklins Gardens. There will be some leaves on the pitch – but not distractingly so. The weather might be fine or blustery, dry or wet, it doesn’t really matter. Thirty young men – the cream of their generation will line up in front of a short stone plinth on which rests a rugby ball surrounded by a laurel wreath to pay their respects to the sons of this town and its surrounding areas who didn’t come back from two world wars.

 

After an appropriate period of silence, the match day announcer – a man of about 70 who played for the Club in the 1960s – will intone Laurence Binyon’s poem of remembrance and invariably will end with a croak in his voice as the emotion once more proves too much for him. As he concludes the line “We will remember them…” many voices in the crowd will quietly echo the last line in their own tribute. And my voice will be one of those.

 

In all honesty, I always had a problem with Remembrance each November.

 

I was born in 1953. My parents had served in the RAF, working on radar on the Isle of Wight before being demobbed in 1945. Obviously they had witnessed air-raids and had generally experienced the six years of privation and fear. But they hadn’t served with people who had died. Post-war Civvie Street for them was not focussed on The British Legion and the friendships they had made during the war. I think they felt that the war had cheated them of a big chunk of their youth and for us, the fifties and sixties were times of getting on with living rather than looking back over our shoulders at the wars. If Remembrance Sunday was a big deal for them, I certainly don’t remember it.

 

By the time I hit college, a burgeoning peace and pacifist movement was espousing the cause of white poppies in November time, and for myself I just couldn’t unravel all of the nonsense which goes with Acts of Remembrance from the central truth of it all.

 

I felt that old soldiers who seem to like dressing up in medals and bowler hats were too keen to cling to their past rather than embracing their futures. I railed against the Royal Family dressing up in Ruritanian uniforms in pretence of solidarity with the armed forces who blindly keep them in power. On the back of the anti-war movement stirred up by the Vietnam War I decided that Acts of Remembrance glorified conflicts which rationally should be condemned. I wanted no part of it.

 

I don’t know what started to change my mind. Certainly, I think the first war against Iraq played a significant part in making me understand the risks we ask  our armed forces to be ready to make to make on our behalf. I supported the cause but felt guilty that without personal family members actually involved, it was just too easy to get gung ho about sending our forces to bloody Saddam’s nose. It might perhaps have been events in the Falklands War, particularly the battleground burial of H Jones whose poignancy struck me. But above all, it has been being a parent for the past 21 years which has brought me to a realisation of why we should remember those who have died in our wars of the past century.

 

Those who died were all someone’s children and my children have benefited from their sacrifice. To his great pride my son has played at Franklins Gardens, and also like his sister has used that pavilion to shelter from inclement weather before happily piling out onto the pitches beyond to play their hearts out. I hope other parents will share my pride in them while, next Saturday I will try to share a little of their loss.

 

We will remember them.