It was with my BBC news producer's hat on that I found myself at the Cenotaph in Whitehall yesterday. My job was to produce the coverage for the BBC's News Channel which involved planning where we were going to be and who we would interview in the way of war veterans, serving soldiers etc. 'What exactly does a news producer do?', I hear you ask. Just about everything, is the answer. It would be easier to give you a list of things that are outside my remit on a live broadcast!
I had the good fortune to be working with a very competent correspondent which always makes a producer's life more pleasant. I knew that with him, whatever the day threw at us, he would make sense of it and remain on air, calm and unruffled as I whizzed about behind the scenes trying to sort it all out. You'd be amazed how often correspondents, even ones that are household names, resort to prima-donna-ish behaviour or get really uptight if something out of the ordinary occurs. I could tell you a few stories there but that's probably going to have to wait until I get my novel published and you can all try and guess who the fictional characters are based on!
Anyway, I digress. Remembrance Sunday, in my opinion, is very important to our nation in many ways. Critics who denounce it as a day glorifying war have got it wrong. Yes it's true that the survivors are celebrated among their peers and the public applauds their courage and efforts to march past various war memorials up and down the country. But in a way it exposes not just the heroism but the horror of warfare and acts as a useful pointer to the ability of man to wage war on his fellow man. Isn't the point of studying history to prevent us from making the same mistakes in the future?
From a young age, my kids have been taken to our local war memorial and we've stood in the sun, fog and rain and observed the 2 minute silence together. I've attempted to explain to them the significance of what those soldiers did in the two world wars and how both conflicts altered the course of history and how different our lives might be today, had the outcomes been reversed.
Yesterday, shading my eyes against the low autumn sunshine, I watched as the crowds grew progressively larger and as members of the royal family and the armed services took their positions around the modest white structure of the Cenotaph. The music of the Massed Bands filled the air, as it has done every year since 1920, providing a melodious accompaniment to the golden leaves as they swirled lazily from the horse chestnut trees onto the assembled heads below. The music played was standardised in 1930 and although it sometimes changes, the basic shape has remained much the same ever since.
With the pomp and circumstance of 'Rule Britannia' drifting over Whitehall followed by the more reflective 'Skye Boat Song' and Elgar's hauntingly beautiful 'Nimrod', the mood in the crowd became sombre and subdued. The solemnity of the occasion broken only by the five hundred or so smart phones and tablets thrust high in the air as the Duchess of Cambridge appeared on the balcony of the Foreign Office, the fake 'click, clack' shutter noise punctuating the silence as we awaited the arrival of the Queen.
When Her Majesty appeared from the innards of the Foreign Office precisely at 1058:45, her diminutive appearance, as always, belied her importance. In the crowd the recording devices went into overdrive and disappointingly some people even found in necessary to click clack away during the 2 minute silence. Hmmmm. At 1100 the canon boomed, the noise ricocheting off the Portland stone buildings, Big Ben began to chime and heads dipped in unison to remember, and for those of us lucky enough never to have personally experienced the horrors of war, to imagine, in silence.
I expected to cry. I always have done either sat at home watching the service on TV or standing at the Sevenoaks war memorial. A tear inexorably rolls as I think of the mud, guns, horses and Tommies of WW1 and of the concentration camps, sunk ships and downed aircraft of WWII. The young lives cut short by our government's recent decisions to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan and the horrific injuries sustained by our troops cut down by IEDs or Taliban AK47s which once would have guaranteed death but now, thanks to improvements in battlefield first aid, means a generation of amputees and brain-damaged young people are here to stay.
I think of the bravery of those who are still willing to join the armed forces or become reservists knowing full well that when push comes to shove, they will be expected to die or suffer life-changing injuries for their country. I think of my own darling children and that potentially one day in the future with another pointless conflict raging overseas, I may be that clench-jawed mother sitting at home dreading the knock on the door from a uniformed officer, come to give me bad news.
So I cry selflessly for others and I cry indulgently for my imagined future self. But yesterday no tears came. Maybe it was because I was surrounded by my peers, a bunch of hardened hacks, or maybe my journalist's brain just couldn't switch off enough to get that carried away. I must admit to quietly calculating the risk of a terrorist attack and what a coup it would be for any nutter wearing a suicide vest to get that close to wiping out the royal family, the leaders of all three political parties, a large proportion of the cabinet and the heads of the Navy, Army and Air Force. I did find myself scanning the crowd for any sweating person sporting a rucksack with wires.
But thankfully the day passed off with the precision of a well-oiled machine that has been whirring for the best part of ninety-plus years and the veterans all escaped the cold and went off for their lunchtime reunions and I got home in time to spend some time with my family. My opportunity to shed a tear came just now in Sevenoaks High Street as I lined up dutifully outside Tesco to join the 2 minute silence led by the small group of veterans who do it every year at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, come what may.
They stood by the road, their colour proudly raised against the grey drizzle and steadfastly performed their ritual, a poignant sight given their age and diminishing numbers. I dipped my head and welcomed the lump that made its way to my throat and the tear that escaped my eye. I ignored the cold and the rain. It was the least I could do, after all, they gave their today for my tomorrow.
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