Remembering again
Remembrance Sunday is a poignant time for my family - my wife's side of the family, that is - because her grandmother lost her only son - my wife's putative uncle - in the First World War, and never recovered from the shock. Owen Griffiths was killed early in the War, and is named on the memorial at Mons. He had three sisters - one of whom was of course my wife's mother - who went on to solid, middle-class careers in teaching and healthcare. But it was the loss of the boy that did for my wife's grandmother. Every year my wife's sister puts on display the family photograph of Owen Griffiths, in military uniform. This is how she described the effect of his loss on her grandmother and her mother: "When she [our grandmother] was dying she just said, according to our mother, I never should have let him go, he was much too young. And she never got over the fact that her only son had died, aged 21, in the First World War. And our mother, who was sixteen at the t...