Not Remembering

I never knew my father-in-law, Private Oscar Dale. He grew up by Bondi Beach, played cricket with a young lad called Bradman, and in 1940 he signed up to join the Australian Army and fight in WWII. Oscar travelled by ship to Cairo, sending postcards of the pyramids back home to Sydney before fighting with the allies in Egypt. Later he entered the fight in the Greek peninsula and after capture spent a considerable time as a prisoner of war in Austria and Germany. While in prison he learnt a little German, but he also learnt how to resist, and for that he was led out one day to a firing squad. At the last moment he asked to defend his actions, he spoke in his newly learnt German, and remarkably his life was spared. At the end of the war Oscar returned home to his young Australian wife via England. Unfortunately, while he was being hidden by Greek farmers earlier in the war he had drunk diseased goat’s milk and this undermined his health throughout his life. He passed away before his youngest daughter Marilyn met and married a young English opera singer. So Oscar has never heard my gratitude for my wife, or met his pommie granddaughters. Although one day we will all worship together.

On Remembrance Day, as a community and a nation we remember conflict and sacrifice and we pray for justice and peace. Two minutes silence is never long enough to remember those who laid down their lives and I am always conscious that, as a man whose life has been barely touched by war, I stand alongside others whose fathers and brothers and mothers and daughters have paid the very highest price. We will remember them.

And I remember with affection my father-in-law who I never met, a memory lost because of a glass of milk in a war zone. And in the sadness of ‘not remembering’, I try to comprehend the weight of ‘not remembering’ a father who hasn't returned from Iraq, or a mother who hasn't returned from Afghanistan.

When you go home

tell them of us and say,

for your tomorrow

we gave our today