Memories and Medals

A photomontage is next to me as I write this. It comprises photos of my eldest son, my father, my grandfather and myself. My father compiled it to show the first-born (male) of four generations. For that reason alone, it is an important keepsake. But it is also treasured as the only known photo of my grandfather. He is pictured staring sternly at the camera at some racecourse somewhere—probably in Christchurch where he lived. He enjoyed the races, an enjoyment my father inherited but I did not. What I did inherit however is much more important. They are memories and medals.
My memories of my grandfather are of an imposing figure often sitting on a high-back chair, which of course we christened the throne.  That was in the house he and my grandmother owned in Godley Avenue Papanui (in point of fact one of the most ungodly avenues in town and long-since renamed). Nobody else was allowed to sit on that throne. Nobody else, but me. Why me, I don’t know. I wouldn’t say I was his favourite, but it was me who went out with him trudging through the ditches of those long Canterbury roads picking wild mint that we later sold by the sack-load to Boss Sauce. It was me he taught to hunt and trap rabbits. And it was me he always found a “special” book for. And it would be me, me alone, who would have treasured memories of all of that.
As for the medals? I have his medals from both world wars for he had served in both. I have those, and a shell case he purloined from World War I’s Western Front. I also have his discharge papers from that first world war that tell me my grandfather was 5’9” (slightly shorter than me), and that he served as a private in the Canterbury Infantry Regiment for a period of 2 years and 191 days, 2 years and 41 days of which he served overseas on the Western European Front during 1917/18. He was awarded the British War Medal and the Victory Medal. He was discharged 25th April 1919 at the ripe old age of 25. In the Second World War he served for 3 years and 99 days with the Royal New Zealand Airforce, and discharged 5th July with the rank of lance corporal. His occupation is given as rabitter.
It is information such as this, and those memories, that keep my grandfather close to me. Yet they are not needed. Like those many many thousands of New Zealanders and Australians who this morning honoured their forebears I need no tangible aid or physical item to remember. Those men and women who served are justly and always remembered on this day and every day, not because of what they accomplished, but because of who they were, what they did, and what they left us all…Pride.
Lest we forget? Not a chance.