Thread by @frankcottrell_b

Remembrance Day Thread:
In my mid twenties I was privileged to make the acquaintance of an elderly gent who had celebrated his 21st birthday during the Battle of the Somme.

He’d worked all his life with dray horses on the docks and canals. He was always immaculately turned out and wore a bow tie to church. A dandy and a flirt, I used to take him shopping and to mass ...

He’d been taken prisoner by the Germans but always spoke Kindly and respectfully of them. Of the officer who captured him: "He spoke better English than I did."

Of the camp guards; "We were half-starved but God love them they had little enough to eat themselves."
But there was a group of people of whom he did not speak Kindly ...

At the end of the war he and his comrades, once liberated, were left to find their own way home.
Hungry and penniless, they had to beg their way back. He would cry when he described this.
The humilation was worse than mud and shells for him.

At the time I used to think - and him such a dandy, that must have hurt.
But of course now I’m older I realise the bow ties, shiny shoes and decorous manners were a protest.

The people who tried to kill him he forgave.

The people who took his dignity he couldn't.

#LestWeForget

I feel I should add that whenever I took him to Sainsburys in Mossley Hill he would buy a six pack of Club biscuits, break it open and give one each to the check out staff!

Another memory - we put 89 candles on his cake for his 89th birthday without realising that even birthday cake candles can produced thick clouds of churning black smoke and eyebrow burning heat if there's enough of them.