I remember when I was a kid going to see my great grandma (Mum’s Mum’s Mum). She was a very old lady then (80 when I was born, lived till she was 93. Would have lived longer if she hadn’t been forced out of the home she loved and lived in for the previous 50 years and into residential care because her landlord wanted to sell it. She died of sorrow at her loss. Laugh away, but extreme misery can kill) and I remember there were lots of photographs and knick-knacks on the walls and every surface, a typical working class terraced house from the late Victorian era frozen in time.*
Amongst them was a photograph of a serious faced man in a uniform holding the bridle of a horse. That was my great granddad, he was wearing the uniform of a First World War gunner from the Royal Field Artillery and the horse was Daisy, and he rode her across the battlefield. This film War Horse that everyone is talking about from the children’s book by Michael Morpurgo has brought the memory back of being told about this.
Everybody alive has memories of being told of stories like War Horse, stories of a now dead ancestor who did their bit in the Great War. Thanks to people like Mr Morpurgo their memories will be kept alive onto the next generation.
*As far as I can discover, the landlord went in, emptied the house, sold everything he could and destroyed the rest. My grandma and her younger sister, and my Mum didn’t find out till it was too late. For someone obsessed with property, he had no respect for anyone else’s.
