His name was George, and I had a hard time tracking him down.
He stayed in the outskirts of Possilpark in Glasgow where the dingy flats finally give up chasing the countryside away, and sit sullenly looking out over the copses and scrubland to the Campsie Fells beyond.
He was a Mr Never-in, was George. I tried visiting three or four times in the space of a fortnight before I finally got him at home. And he was pleased to see me, I think. I was the new student minister in his church.
He was a tall man; stooped by age, but still lean in body and face. He spoke gently and though his smile was rare, it was always genuine. And he carried himself with the kind of dignity that men who’ve seen action often possess.
I remember sitting in his wee living room and looking around as he went to the kitchen to make a coffee. The haphazard collection of memorabilia on the walls and mantelpiece told their own story. Wedding photo. A family gathering. Grandchildren. A black and white image of a group of young soldiers standing by a jeep somewhere out in the desert. A young George looking back at me from a distance of sixty years.
Surrounded by memories, but alone with them now, as a widower of several years.
We passed an hour together, and to be honest I remember very little of what we spoke about. But I left that day with a strong sense that there were depths to George that I hadn’t begun to fathom.
A few weeks later it was Remembrance Sunday, and it was the tradition in that church that the oldest living combatant would bring the poppy wreath forward at the start of the service. For years that duty had fallen to an old soldier in his 90’s, but with his passing, the honour fell to George for the first time.
I remember him coming in as we were singing the first hymn, and making his way shakily down the aisle, and I was glad that only those of us at the front could see his face because he was just about holding it together.
It’s hard to find the words to sum up how he looked. That tall, kind man, now shaking like a leaf as he bent down to place the wreath before the communion table. His body was there, quivering, but his mind was a thousand miles away in some field, or forest or trench where he lost the friends he fought beside. You could see it in his eyes, and the tight set of his mouth.
He’d survived it. But he never spoke about it. We talked often in my times there, but this part of his life was off limits. And I think that very often that’s the way with men like George. It’s those who have seen most and lost most who talk the least.
Some things are hard to talk about - even when you remember
them well.
Get a group of veterans together and they’ll chat readily about the places they visited during the war, the people they served alongside, the practical jokes they played. But it’s rare to hear them talk about their experiences on the front line.
What they remember best - they tend not speak of.
It is hard to really talk about the details of what happened: the real costs:
how their comrades died; how their parents, or brothers or sisters, or friends paid the costs of war,
how their own minds and hearts were
affected and never quite the same again.
Our most important memories for the most part are silent ones. Ones that we don’t talk about because of the pain that still resides in them and because they’re almost impossible to share with anyone who has not been there with you.
This week I travelled across to Oban to take the funeral of my wife’s great Aunt who was very dear to us. She was from Lancashire and in the war years she served in an RAF radar station in Norfolk, charting the movements of enemy aircraft. She was full of stories of the camaraderie she found among the folk who worked there, and she stayed good friends with some of them for the rest of her life.
But we know that at one point the young man she loved, and was engaged to, left on a sortie and never came back. She hardly ever spoke about him. It was only in recent days that a little more of that story began to emerge, and only with one or two people.
Some memories are just too painful to revisit.
We keep them stored in a locked room in our mind.
Every now and again we’ll go in and sit in that place in silence for a while, and very occasionally,
if the mood and the company’s right, we might allow someone else to glimpse what’s in there.
But for the most part, those doors stay firmly closed.
And when it comes to this particular Sunday in the year, perhaps it’s right that they do.
Our culture has an almost pornographic obsession with putting everything on display;
but we all know that there are some things that shouldn’t be treated that way because exposure cheapens them. Some things deserve honour and privacy and respect.
We don’t need those who lived through the war as combatants or civilians to share all their innermost memories with us. There are moments when we can read their sorrows in their faces.
But it is important that those who were there, those who fought hard and made it home
feel that all that happened was worthwhile, that it made a difference, and that those who sacrificed so much, are given the honour and respect they deserve.
It is always the way that in times of peace, soldiers and sailors and airmen are undervalued.
But today we remember with gratitude the enormity of the sacrifices that they made in the two world wars so the tyrrany of nations could be ended.
We recognise that cost, and we honour today those who served and those who died,
for us, for our country, and for those who could not fight to save themselves.
War is not a part of God’s plan for this world.
The prophet Isaiah predicts a day when swords will be beaten into ploughshares, and the wolf will lie down in peace with the lamb.
And Christ teaches us to pray for God’s kingdom to come;
and war has no place in that future.
But those days have not yet come.
And as long as our human story is marred by dischord and greed - in other words, by sin -war will be an inevitable part of our landscape.
But we have this promise in the heart of today’s Psalm to hold onto.
God promises that “The wicked will not always rule over the land of the righteous”.
There will be a reckoning, God says, and evil shall not win.
And when we stand up against injustice and oppression,
against violence and tyrrany,
we are firmly within the expressed will of God.
Our prayers today are for the men and women who,
in taking that stand,
gave all that they had to give.
For them, we pray in the words of the Psalmist:
“Lord, do good to those who are good, to those who obey your commands”.
On this Remembrance Sunday, Psalm 125 reminds us that there will be a terrible reckoning for wrongdoing, but lasting reward for those who do the right.
Today we commemorate those who did right, and commit ourselves to follow their example in our day and age.
We will remember them.
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