In the 1960s my father owned a number of shops in Wiltshire and Somerset<\/p>\n
These ranged from a couple of newsagents to a pet shop in Frome and a hardware shop in Holt<\/p>\n
He employed a number of people whose names I cannot fully remember<\/p>\n
However I clearly remember two who I only knew as Stratford Phillips and Wilson Davis<\/p>\n
They were both military in the bearing having served in the last war<\/p>\n
I later learned that both had been officers with distinguished service records<\/p>\n
This puzzled me as my father employed both these men in modest positions<\/p>\n
It was then that I began to think about war and its consequences<\/p>\n
My father told me that both Wilson Davis and Stratford Phillips had seen things that few would ever see or forget<\/p>\n
They were both at Dunkirk and Stratford Phillips was one of the first ashore during the D Day Landings<\/p>\n
They both had untidy wars as did my father who served in Burma and India<\/p>\n
Although I richly wanted to question them about their wartime exploits I never did<\/p>\n
As I could see that both these brave men and my father craved the obscurity of their peacetime lives<\/p>\n
Wars to me are split into two categories necessary wars and unnecessary wars<\/p>\n
World War Two was a necessary war but World War One was an unnecessary war<\/p>\n
I cannot think of many wars since then that have been necessary really not one<\/p>\n
Last week I was in Margate on business and I took time out to look at a statue near the railway station<\/p>\n
It was called April is the cruellest month<\/em> and comes from Eliot’s poem The Wasteland\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Which was written in part at the adjacent Nayland Rock Shelter<\/p>\n It is based on a war veteran who served in Iraq in 2003 and is the first in a series of coastal statues<\/p>\n What makes this statue different is that it points towards London instead of out to sea<\/p>\n The accusation is clear as the soldier points towards Parliament where the decision was made to go to war<\/p>\n It is a powerful piece and questions the dishonesty of the Prime Minister and others at the time<\/p>\n Many years have passed and the generations of Stamford Phillips and Wilson Davis have faded<\/p>\n But their message and the message of my father is still clear and for as long as I can I will continue to write<\/p>\n As I was about to leave I decided on a whim to sit in the dilapidated shelter and read as I often do<\/p>\n The book that I reading was a biography of Wilfred Owen and peacefully I finished the book<\/p>\n It was as I was learning about Wilfred’s death near the Sambre and Oise Canal<\/p>\n That a very small leaf fell onto the final page as if by accident but I knew the real reason<\/p>\n A fancy perhaps but I have retained this small refugee in the pages of his book<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the 1960s my father owned a number of shops in Wiltshire and Somerset These ranged from a couple of newsagents to a pet shop in Frome and a hardware shop in Holt He employed a number of people whose names I cannot fully remember However I clearly remember two who I only knew as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8187"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}