A short story by George Nicolls, Dibden Purlieu, Southampton.

The old man stood in the light that spilled from the supermarket entrance, he steadied a tray of poppies with his left hand, his right held a collecting tin. 

His hair showed white under the faded beret he wore, and the medals on his chest clinked faintly as he reached forward to pass a poppy to the customer who had placed a donation in his collecting tin, “Thank you sir”, he said. 

He stamped his feet trying to keep some feeling in his toes, as he felt the bite of the cold north east wind. 

He squinted through the supermarket entrance trying to see the clock, but couldn’t. 

“Ah well” he thought, “I’ll give it a bit longer”, though the stream of customers was beginning to thin out as folk hurried home to tea. 

He leaned against the wall to ease his aching legs, and his mind wandered off to days long past.

It is 1930, he is ten years old, he stands beside his father at the local war memorial. 

Father is wearing his one and only good suit, his medals newly polished pinned to the left side of his jacket. 

It’s a good turn out, the Boys Brigade, the Scouts, the Salvation Army, and a good number of local people, the war still being fresh in their memories. 

The bugler begins to sound the last post, he looks up at his father about to ask him something, but stops. 

He is puzzled, his father’s eyes are filled with tears. He cannot understand. If ever he cried having skinned his knees, he was always told men don’t cry.

His mind skips again, it is 1940, he was twenty a few weeks ago. 

He is packing a few things into a battered suitcase, like his father before him he is off to war. Somehow the war to end all wars had failed. 

As he packed his few belongings, he little knew that it would be another six years, four of them overseas, before he would be home again. 

In those six years he would come to know why men, like his father before him, do sometimes cry. 

The soldier, who sees his best friend cut down by a sniper’s bullet at nineteen. 

The airman watching his friend trying to land his badly damaged bomber, having survived the hell over the target, only to die in a ball of fire on his own runway. 

The sailor firing depth charges from the destroyer, as seamen from the burning tanker struggle to survive in a sea black with oil. That is war.

His  mind jumps back to the present. 

He sadly shakes his old head, will nothing ever change? 

Yet again young men are being cut down in their prime, sometimes by fanatics, suicide bombers, often no older than themselves. 

Why is there so much hatred in the world? 

He is uneasy about this war. In his war he had no such doubts, his enemy intended to invade his homeland and change his way of life forever.

Things are not so clear-cut this time. 

The politicians, who were so eager to send these lads off to fight, have never fired a shot in anger or dived into a slit trench headfirst as the bombs began to fall. 

They might have hesitated if they had.

He shakes his head again, closes the lid on his tray of poppies, finds his stick and limps off across the now rapidly emptying car park. 

He heads for his bed-sit in the sheltered housing complex. 

He thinks “I’ll watch the Festival of Remembrance from the Albert Hall tonight, and tomorrow morning the march past at The Cenotaph”. 

I don’t doubt he will cry, but no son will see his tears, he was killed in the first Gulf War.         

..........................................................................The end