Two kinds of remembering

St German's Remembrance Sunday Mass this morning began with my reading of the names of all those who died in two World Wars, about eighty names all told, from St German's and from St Agnes a long vanished daughter church. From the surnames it was possible tell that some families lost two and three sons on the Western Front. One of the Curates, John Godfrey Barton was killed in the North African campaign in the Second World War, and one of the Parish Sisters died in a blitz raid.

No doubt there were also servicemen raised locally who were killed in half a dozen or more conflicts that British forces have been involved in over my lifetime. The lack of any church monument to any of them reflects not only that there were fewer of them, but also it's a symptom of the dispersion of once tight knit working class neighbourhoods over the past half century, with the rise of post war housing estates around the periphery of the city. The impulse to raise a memorial to local fallen comrades would not be so strong with fewer of them, less well remembered. Those newer war memorials will tend to be raised only where churches serve the neighbourhood of a military base. 

I get quite irritated if I attend a Remembrance ceremony where the fallen of post 1945 conflicts are not referred to, at least in general. It confines to the past something which remains still part of our troubling present. We have still not conquered the deeply embedded impulse to wage war despite knowing in more graphic detail than ever just how evil war is.

Yesterday, our dear friends Oswald and Marion took us out to lunch at Miskin Manor near Pontyclun. It's a delightful Victorian homage to a prestigious mediaeval country house, with harmonious late 20th century additions, set in well managed grounds with a lovely mixture of trees, still in leaf on this mild late autumn day. At some stage in the afternoon I fell to reminiscing about my mother's Yorkshire Spice Cake recipe. Clare wondered if she still had it following a cook book clear out before we moved. Later in the evening she proved she'd retained it, by cooking a small trial version with half the sugar of the original, to suit our taste.

We ate Yorkshire Spice Cake for pudding at lunch, mine with yoghourt - not the way I would have enjoyed it fifty years ago. The texture, once cold enough was just perfect, but my memory of the flavour was that it was spicier in those days. The keynotes were ginger and nutmeg, but did my mother use anything else, not recorded in the text? Maybe not. My palate has changed. I have far less of a sweet tooth and we use spices in cooking far more now than when I was growing up. Far more is available to us to use, not to mention recipes and foods from far and wide. I didn't taste yoghourt or eat curry for the first time until I'd left home for university, forty eight years ago. This month it's forty eight years since Clare and I first met.