IT took a while to realise just how special the scene in front of me was.
A Yeoman Warder of the Tower of London stood on a green mound rising from a sea of red poppies. Flanked by a Guards bugler, he read out the names of two great uncles.
In the thickening darkness, red uniform picked out by a spotlight, voice rolling off the soaring walls behind, he read 180 names of the dead of the First World War.
When his list was completed he spoke Binyon’s poem.
“…At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them….”
Then the guardsman stepped up to play The Last Post, the quivering notes welling up out of the outsize trench that is the castle moat.
A large crowd of tourists and relatives watched from the ticket office terrace, a public area outside the castle.
It was a moving and understated ceremony that forms a daily part of the Bloodswept Lands And Seas Of Red commemorative installation created by stage designer Tom Piper and ceramic artist Paul Cummins.
SNAKE
Red poppies pour from a turret window, surge over a stone bridge and flow out around the moat. Red fingers snake out over the green grass, spreading every day.
By November 11 – Remembrance Day – 888,246 poppies, one for every British and Empire soldier killed in the First World War, will encircle William the Conqueror’s castle.
And two poppies among them will be for John and Fred.
Corporal John Poole, mum’s mum’s brother, served in “Z” 24th Trench Mortar Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery.
He was blown to pieces near Loos on December 23, 1916. His body was never found but he is remembered at Dud Corner cemetery. He was 21.
Corporal Frederick Gubbins, mum’s dad’s brother, served in 2/4 Battalion, The Queen’s (Royal West Surrey Regiment). He survived being torpedoed in the Med before fighting in Palestine.
Fred was killed in hand-to-hand fighting with the Turks on December 21, 1917, and is buried in Jerusalem. He was 19.
HONEY
We arrived early for the evening ceremony last Thursday. The low sun gave the castle walls a honey glow. The poppies gleamed wetly, stalks throwing clustered shadows.
I tried to take a picture and was annoyed that the elongated silhouettes of the army of onlookers stretched in among the poppies.
Then it dawned that they were the picture. They showed the enthusiasm of large numbers of tourists and residents for the brilliant poppy project.
And maybe John and Fred were there among the long shadows.
█ The Roll of Honour is read each day, 8.40-9pm. Find details at www.hrp.org.uk/TowerOfLondon/VisitUs/Topthingstoseeanddo/Poppies/RollofHonour
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Remembering Barbara – www.barbaragubbins.co.uk
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