Today is 25 April, ANZAC Day, a day where we remember those brave men who fought to keep our country and our neighbour across the ditch, Australia, safe.
Each year, we have commemorated and today is no different except for one small factor – we are in lockdown, isolation, due to the world pandemic that is covid-19.
So, no dawn parade at our local cenotaph. Instead, we will quietly, in our own way, remember. Remember family members who left their homeland to fight, some of whom never to return.
This year, I have put, like many others, poppies (drawn by me – I had hoped Johnny might help but he is at the age where he draws over everything :-)) on our fence and in our window so that people passing by can see and remember.
It’s hard to believe five years ago marked the 100th anniversary of the ANZAC landing at Gallipoli.
It got me thinking about my own family and who had served during WWI. One of my majors at university was history and I’d even enrolled in a history paper dedicated to WWI but that was 20 plus years ago…
I remember years ago dad mentioning that his uncle, my great-uncle, had fought during WWI and had been killed at Gallipoli. I remember dad saying his mother and aunt held their brother is high esteem.
Dad never knew him because my great-uncle had died before my father was born.
I don’t’ really know much about my great-uncle Stuart apart from what dad told me. He was my dad’s uncle, my granny’s brother. A Kiwi. A southern man born in Oamaru. He wasn’t enlisted in the New Zealand Army. Rather, he was in the Australian army – most probably because he was living there at the time war broke out.
I have a box of great-uncle Stuart’s trinkets, passed down from granny to dad to me. There’s an old signet ring which my granny and great-aunt thought brought bad luck to its wearer, most likely because great-uncle Stuart was wearing it when he died. So, there it sits, still in its box…
The other person in my family who served in WW1 on the frontline was my granny, dad’s mum. A Kiwi too, she was a nurse in the British Red Cross at Paris-Plage in France. Fortunately, she made it home, otherwise I wouldn’t be here. I still have medals and letter from the king conveying gratitude for having served king and country.
So, today we got up early (6am) and remembered. We stood at our gate, on our street, and despite covid-19, united (but keeping our two-metre distance) to remember.
We remember my great-uncle, Sergeant Stuart Walls, unit AIF, Australian Infantry, 18 Battalion. Killed in action on 27 August 1915. And we also remember Rich’s great-great uncle, Peter Leitch, who died in Rouen on 27 August 1918.
Lest we forget.
x
For the love of... 
Beautifully written. I too was thinking of my grandfather who was a captain in the NZ Army in WWII. He wrote the official war record for his unit in the Solomon Islands which Mum has the original. It is fascinating reading especially his account of Christmas. He was kept behind to write this and the ship that he should have been on was torpedoed. I found Anzac Day this year incredibly moving particularly standing amongst my neighbours in silence at the top of my driveway.
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