Remembrance Day

I was just talking with my mom and she told me that today is her least favourite day of the year. She said it brings back too many painful memories and feelings. Mom was in London during WWII. She was there for the bombings. She related a story to me about one of the bombings in 1940. She was just about 4. Her brother John was in a school that had just finished building bomb shelters and they hadn't even had a practice. The school was completely levelled. By the Grace of God, the warning sirens sounded with enough time to get all souls out of the school and into the shelters. Mom remembers the fear in her mother and other mothers. The streets around the school were flooded because water mains had broken in the bombing. Firefighters were grabbing the children from the school yard and carrying them across the street to waiting parents. John wasn't there. He had decided that he would go his own way and went uphill to find a place he could cross the street himself. 68 years later and that memory and the feelings that went with it are very vivid to Mom.