Armistice Day

We were determined today to attend the one hundred year commemoration of The Armistice today to be held appropriately outside the Auckland War Memorial Museum and indeed we did, arriving just in time to catch the beginning of the ritual. The Mayor looked splendid in his official regalia and when he spoke he did so well and was pleasingly brief. A schoolgirl called Fabiana spoke passionately about the actions of hands in war, the consequences of those actions and I began to think of Dylan Thomas - `The hand that signed the paper felled a city’.
An elderly man, standing straight and tall, spoke eloquently in Maori, the words so powerful that I wished I understood and later wished I had paid attention to his name because I failed to find it when searching through the Order of Service. The Master of Ceremonies, whose name I did find, spoke about the fact that many New Zealand families lost more than one son in the conflict with a notable few losing three or even four and this made it sound like the breathless countdown to destruction that sometimes happens with road deaths on statutory holidays. Later as we trod through the rows of twenty thousand crosses I bent to look at a photograph someone had placed in a plastic bag and entwined around the cross. Four handsome young men with half smiles stared up at me, proud in their uniforms and off on an adventure, off to see the world. I had found one of those special families!
It began to rain, not the usual harsh semi-tropical rain we are accustomed to in Auckland but gently, persistently, Dylan-Thomas-like - `hands have no tears to flow’.
As children we never really understood what marking Armistice Day was all about because by the time we had any perception of it they had changed the name to Remembrance Day which then became Remembrance Sunday and finally Poppy Day. Despite all this the Crayford aunts firmly continued to refer to it as Armistice Day with their voices slightly lowered and even my grandmother would halt momentarily when it was mentioned and stare into the middle distance for a second or two and perhaps mention Poor Violet Eves who lost her young husband in 1917 and their son in 1944. This undoubtedly made her special.
The first Armistice Day I remember was almost certainly 1945 when I stood with my mother at the War Memorial on The Hill and thrilled to the sound of The Last Post whilst men bared their heads and a nearby tall green bus became silent and still in reverence. The day was crisply cold and my fingers were numb even in my newly knitted green mittens. This might have even been the advent and re-establishment of church bells after the war because all at once there was a burst and discord of bells, a cacophony I was not accustomed to and momentarily terrifying.
Today, although we had been promised bells, for some reason we did not hear them from where we stood and we commented on it as we walked back down Parnell Road, stopping off at Non Solo Pizza for coffee and Amoretto, the latter because it was a special Sunday and the rain was still falling - raining a century of tears.