My grandfather took me to the top of the Road of Remembrance in Folkestone when I was a girl. It had been built for the men to march down to a special pier built for the troopships. They marched down it, hearing the guns across the channel, and many of them would never return. In those days, when I was young, there were banks of rosemary down the side of the road, for remembrance, and I would think of that road, and the young men marching (my grandfather had brothers die out there) during the two minutes silence. Now, you would have to look hard to find the herb there, and maybe most of the people have forgotten why it bears the name it does.
I took a party of school children on a geography trip to Folkestone, and we arrrived at the top of the road by the war memorial with some time to spare, so I told them what I have just told you. As I did so, I saw an elderly man who had been sitting on a nearby seat start to listen, and begin to push himself up to standing position. I was afraid I had said something to upset him, but by the time I had finished, he seemed to have changed his mind, and sat down again. I would have liked to have heard what he had to say, but I was in charge of a group of children, and had to go on with them.
When I was fourteen, my grandfather died. He became confused at the end, and believed the hospital was a field station in Flanders, where he had served as an orderly. I realised then that the lists of names on the memorials could not be, and never would be complete, for many of the old men who had been there would, like my grandfather, at the other end of the century, die in the First World War. There will be those from other wars since who know the same confusion at their ends. I hope that the man who sat in the Folkestone sun was, or is, spared that.

Penny