HOME PAGE

Self-Sufficiency in Style 

“Lest we forget"

This piece was originally written in 1999 and its publication now, five years later, was inspired by a chance meeting with US veterans and their wives in an English country town.

They had returned to England in 2004 for the first time in 60 years.

We shook their hands and welcomed them. One asked "How did you know we were American?

His wife giggled, looked down, and commented "I think it is fairly obvious."

She was right, you can never mistake pants for trousers.

A few hundred yards further back, the lane had passed through a chicken farm on the site of what was obviously an old airfield.

This part of the world is full of such places, relics of the World War Two, some British and some American.

They lie so closely packed that one wonders how the planes avoided one another.

I assumed that the cross must be some commemoration of the last War, but as I passed it each Monday that conclusion seemed less and less likely.

Thick hedgerows in summer.

If killed abroad, on active service, their servicemen were always buried near where they fell. If they died at home they were buried with their family.

For choice, they usually lie in some village churchyard, where they may be uninvited guests at christenings, marriages and funerals for a hundred years to come.

The American battle-dead were treated similarly before the dismal days of body-bags and disputed policies.

If they died in England, in lieu of local family, they were taken to Cambridge and interred at the American Military Cemetery.

Cambridge is a worthy enough place, honourable of name, magnificent in its way, and no doubt chosen to comfort the relatives.

The serried ranks of their countrymen providing a kind of after-life companionship, but so respectable and cold; the kind of place supposed to appeal to a military mind – ordered and organised.

Any tragic young men might well have chosen, if asked, to have been buried with the people they had arrived to fight with and maybe to defend.

It is, on reflection, surprising that they were not allowed the privilege of resting in the country churchyards, close to each airfield and central still to the life of the village.

They would have been comfortable in such a resting-place, perhaps with comrades, between the village postmistress and the publican, both of whom would have known them well.

So the cross remained a mystery to be passed each Monday and contemplated. Despite its proximity to the airfield, whether British or American, it certainly didn’t look very military.

Probably it commemorated a road accident and was placed there by someone from a country where such gestures are normal.

One particularly sunny morning, when I looked for it as a now familiar landmark, it seemed straighter and brighter. I stopped the car and stumbled a few yards over the furrows and into the field.

A road accident?

The actual graves at Cambridge.

The plate told the story. Eleven airmen piloting a bomber to support their forces at the Battle of the Bulge, December 1944.

Each man named, ranked and blown to oblivion during take-off in an English December fog.

As might be expected, what remained was buried in Cambridge with their compatriots. This little wayside cross just marked the site of the crash.

Who had taken the care to restore this little memorial 55 years later?

It obviously wasn’t cold officialdom. The wooden cross still wasn’t quite straight and the self-congratulatory pat on the back “erected by” or “restored by” was missing.

A clue perhaps in the last words of the memorial: “Lest We Forget.” Unmistakably English words – not the tongue - but the source and sentiment.

Written by Kipling long before he was to lose his only son in the First World War and inscribed everywhere in England – on every war memorial in every city, town and village.

This was an English memorial to these young Americans.

Five shillings from the darts team.

A collection probably in the pub these American boys used, raised ten shillings from the doctor, five from the darts team, fifteen from the grumpy man that sat silently in the corner.

The Scouts that used the hut next door would have contributed a few pennies and there might have been an amazing pound from the barmaid whose eyes were full of tears for a whole month afterwards.

Nobody felt the need to inscribe who had erected the cross. Everyone knew.

The pub was quiet for a while, until a new aircrew took their place and the boisterous normality of young men glad to be alive was restored.

 “Lest We Forget” – but who had varnished and polished fifty-five years later?

Was it the barmaid, now seventy-five? A widow these days; did she take a tin of varnish, once her husband’s, from the garden shed and slowly cycle the lane from the village to quietly tend the memorial of a lover?

Was it one of the Scout troop, now sixty-five? An old man now remembering the Yanks, their gifts of chewing gum and the sweets they called candies. Remembering a ray of lightness and the taste of sweetness in a grey and sugarless rationed world.

Was it perhaps an unacknowledged and unknown child who learned of their true father in a death bed confidence?

Did a Volvo stop in the lay-by and an embarrassed man, or perhaps lady, of fifty-five quickly perform a personal act of remembrance? Ashamed to be caught in an unnatural show of emotion for a father they never knew.

Was it the barmaid?

  “Lest We Forget”

I now know what happened in this lonely place – the untimely death of eleven young men, but don’t know, or even need to know, who it is that still cares enough to make a pilgrimage to tend the cross.

It is enough that they do it for a few short years more.

Come back to this quiet little country lane in ten or twenty or thirty years time and the personal touch will be gone.

The cross  will be surrounded by neat cut grass and a little picket fence with another plaque “Maintained by the US…” or “Refurbished by the Anglo…” Or “Replaced by the Community…”

 And the world will be poorer.

“Lest We Forget”

  What's this to do with Self-Sufficiency?

Everything! Self-Sufficiency is about freedom and decency. The freedom and standards these men fought for.

PS. The humble cross is still there, still tended perhaps by the unknown hand

...thoughts of times long gone

- from the inappropriately named Hangman's Cottage, just to the south of Misery Corner.