Remembrance

The challenge over at Rainbow Lady's Challenge blog is entitled Lest We Forget - Thinking of You. It was posted on Thursday 11 November, Armistice Day, a day when we all stop what we are doing at 11 am to observe two minutes silence to remember the fallen in war.

Today is 14 November, Remembrance Sunday, when there are gatherings and parades in honour of those who lost their lives in war, and at this time I remember Tommy, the great-uncle I never met because he died at exactly this time of year in 1916 in foreign fields. We don't know whether he died on 13 or 14 November. He was only 22 years old, but only a few days away from his 23rd birthday on 18 November. He was the seventh of nine children, and thankfully his three elder brothers all came back from the trenches alive.

The Seaforth Highlanders wore the kilt. You can see a photo of a young lad in uniform here, and of a group here. In the second the soldiers are wearing covers over their kilts and their Glengarrys (hats) to protect the material from dirt and damage.

So I think of Tommy, and feel pain at what he and so many suffered at the Somme, and the many other dreadful battlefields of World War I. I hope that one day I will find that someone in the family has a photo of Tommy, and I hope that one day I will be able to go to lay flowers at his grave.

I've spent a number of years researching family history, and one of my projects is to find out more about Tommy's army service, and make a little booklet to attach to my piece of work of today. In the meantime this little shrine is to commemorate all the lost Tommys.

The base is wood primed with gesso, painted with white acrylic and dried with a heat gun which produced bubbles where the paint was thickest. The barbed wire stamp is Tim Holtz, and I don't know who made the poppy stamps. Images coloured with red and green water colour pens. Text on paper coloured with Old Paper DI.