THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN.

Holding the photograph in her hand, Louise stood like an ice statue, frozen in time.

“Ring o’ ring o’ roses, a pocketful of posies, a-tishu! A-tishu! We all fall down”.

Louise begged again and again to play the game with her adoring grandparents – Substitutes for her own parents whom she had never known.

“Stop it”!

Her grandmother shouted at last, remembering the time and anxious to get tea ready. Louise ran inside at last, the call of her stomach substituted for the call of her voice to the only people she’d ever known as family, inviting them endlessly to come and play.

“You spoil her John”

His wife remarked when they were alone.

“She’ll have you worn out. You should think of your health”.

“Stop it”!

He mimicked his wife.

“You’re only old once”!

Then he ran after Louise once more, Louise, the little girl who’d held them together after her parents were killed during the Second World War.

Louise’s childhood was carefree and happy. Sometimes her days seemed eternal as she excitedly waited for something special to happen.

“Don’t you just love those big saucer eyes”?

John said to Mary.

“One day those eyes will turn a man’s head”.

Within no time at all Louise had blossomed into a woman who loved travelling and went abroad to study. Her greatest love of all was the Orient. Eastern culture fascinated and captivated her, eastern food was tastier than that with which she was familiar and eastern philosophy she found most interesting of all. To her, east rather than west was best.

“Look at this photo Louise has sent us, John”,

Mary implored him.

“Put the damned thing away! I have no wish to see it. I have no time for them or their culture”.

Turning on his heels he slammed out of the room and Mary wondered if he would start shaking again. The nightmares which had become less frequent, had begun again. They were terrible when he first came home – Them and the tortured screams for mercy. Louise’s visit to Japan had brought it all back to him and the mention of it in her letters distressed him beyond endurance. Vivid memories of the trenches, the blood and the corpses and the smell – The terrible indescribable smell had all surfaced once again with such ease and such clarity. His memories of Ypres which had lain dormant for so long and which at first made him wish he’d gone too, were now crowding his mind and crying out for attention. The faces of his friends who had never come home as he had done. She couldn’t get one word out of him and when she did eventually hear his voice again it was only to repeat what she had heard so many times before:

“All those people on the Somme and at Ypres and Paschendaele! The senseless slaughter and waste of human life and for what”?

Then after an interminable silence during which his old eyes filled with tears:

“Our boy lost in the ’39 war. The senseless cruelty of the Jerries and the Japs Then you want to show me a photograph of that bloody country! I’d just as soon be blind than look at their damned country. I hate them! Every last one of them”.

Mary’s attempts to calm him were futile so she quietly took the photograph away and went to bed.

Fugi stared at her with rapt attention. He thought of her as pretty. They’d met during a visit Louise had made as she completed an assignment as part of her journalistic career. His favourite phrase was:

“I have little engrish”, the l being pronounced like an r. Fugi had longed to know more about the west which fascinated him as much as the east did Louise. He wondered if he would ever see it and whether they would become more than the nodding and smiling acquaintances they already were. Then as the weeks turned into months, Louise found herself helping him with his English and began talking about herself, saying she had been orphaned but not telling him why. She told him of her grandparents and then began to realise that things would become very difficult were she to fall in love with him, because of her grandfather’s hatred for the Japanese. She also knew though that in order for there to be peace in the world, hatred like this must be overcome and it had not been her battle or her past so she knew somehow that she had to make him see that in order to have a happy future he must come to terms with his.

A year to the day after they’d first met, they found themselves standing outside her grandparents’ front door. Nervously Louise tapped, rather like the child of long ago who waited impatiently for dawn on Christmas morning and could hold her excitement in no longer so risked waking her grandparents so she could open her presents and have breakfast.

“John’s down at the allotment”,

Mary said.

“You know what he is like about his vegetables”.

Louise sat, paused for flight like a bird who half expected a cat to appear. She knew her grandfather’s feelings and wondered at the wisdom of this visit but her dear wise grandmother had been insistent and begged her to come home in order that he may lay his ghosts to rest before he died. Mary knew that, her time, in particular, was short. Diagnosed with cancer, she knew that John was likely to be alone after her death unless he could reconcile himself to Louise’s choice for a marriage partner. She also knew that Louise, like him, was stubborn and much more likely to go through with marrying Fugi if he set his face against him. Ever the gentleman, John received his visitor with a dignity which cost him dear. He’d shouted at Mary before their arrival, telling her she’d no right to ask him here without his consent and blaming her for violating their home. Wise and thoughtful Mary also realised that, with both of her grandparents dead, Louise also would be alone if she didn’t find someone to love her and she realised too that the war was now so very long ago. However, she also knew that while she’d been part of it she hadn’t been involved in it in the same way as John whose wounds still hurt. He still had shrapnel in his body and visions in his head that wouldn’t go. Mary also realised that to hate a new generation of people for that which their parents and grandparents had done would be unfair and futile and may indeed lead to further wars. She realised that under the skin all our blood is red, that people have the same needs and that bigotry and prejudice are the children of ignorance and fear and that to overcome fear you have to meet and talk with those you do not know, thereby turning strangers into friends no matter what religion or creed you are and no matter what colour too. She knew too that the Christian message of forgiveness had to start in each individual’s heart and spread out like the ripples from a pebble thrown into a pond so that links can be forged and that if this is not done soon we will ultimately bring about our own destruction. This then was her quest, to bring about a sea change in her little pond before she died and reconcile the past to the present by making John see that the only way for him to heal was for him to forgive though realising also that he could never forget. Many would call her a silly old woman but even silly old women are entitled to their dreams or at least that’s what she told herself as she padded off towards the kitchen to make the tea.

Six months later Mary died. Fugi and Louise parted as he made his decision to fly home. He realised that his presence distressed the old man especially now his wife of sixty-five years had died. Louise made the most heartbreaking decision of her life – To let her loved-one go so as to stay and look after her grandfather. She felt the empty days filling up with a dull sense of duty but knew that she owed everything to this old man and her now dead grandmother whose unselfish love had made her who she was. Then the miracle happened.

John, now in his nineties, stood ramrod straight at the Cenotaph, decked out in all his medals and looking handsome even on two sticks, so he could be there to remember all those comrades lost so very long ago. Like millions, they observed the two minutes silence and heard “The Last Post” being played and Louise stood proudly at his side, gently tucking a hand underneath his arm in case he fell. Nobody noticed him at first – The quiet young man from Japan who crept up to John’s other side and in unison said in flawless English:

“At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them”.

With head bowed, he stood in silent homage and paid tribute to those who gave their lives for the freedom we now take so much for granted. This young man, for whom war had thankfully not been a reality, had flown thousands of miles so that he could share this moment not only with the one he loved and couldn’t forget but so he could be with the old man who had given and lost so much. It was at the sound of his voice that Louise looked up but it was John who’d seen him first.

“You’d best come home with us”,

He said when the service was over and he’d chatted to the few friends who were left. This time though he was smiling and his medals were glinting in the autumn sunshine.

At Louise’s wedding he looked as proud as ever and was sorry Mary had not lived to see it, thinking how proud she’d be of “their little girl”. He was also pleased that now Louise would have someone to be with when he too finally died but kept this thought to himself. Louise had just got back to Japan after sorting out her grandfather’s affairs. He had lived long enough to see just one of his great grandchildren be born and was teaching her some colours and nursery rhymes and watching her take her first steps when peacefully he died at home in his sleep. Louise was holding up the photograph of both her grandparents when young and thinking just how handsome and lovely they both were. She hardly heard Fugi creep up behind her and he startled her as he suddenly spoke:

“Ah! You look at John and Marly! We must never forget! We must never, never forget”.

Then, with a drink in each of their hands, they silently looked out at their children playing in the garden and said, in unison as on that other Remembrance Day so long ago and as we will on all the ones to come:

“At the going down of the sun and in the morning we shall remember them”.