As Mr. Goldsmith’s monthly blog (here) alludes to, Remembrance is a brief interlude in an otherwise busy and frenetic world where a community can pause – both to honour the ultimate sacrifice made my many who have gone before us, but also to look ahead – through youthful eyes – to the future. Our contribution to Sunday’s Remembrance Service in Ruyton Parish Church, led by our Heads of School, Choirs and Trumpeter, George, captured the role that young people play in bridging the past and future together. Mr Goldsmith made reference to one of the 48 Packwoodians who lost their lives during the World Wars in Assembly on Monday. Arthur Lewis Jenkins, a member of the Royal Flying Corps, died in the skies over the Arabian Desert on New Years Eve 1917. Like many (and the focus of our Armistice Assembly on Tuesday), he was a war poet, capturing his lived experience through words, including this, found in his possessions on that fateful night:
Out of the desert the pilots come,
Dusty and sunburnt, weary with flight;
They have looked on Death in the noonday sun,
They have faced his face in the night.
Arabia
Our Form 8s stepped up to the responsibility of leading Tuesday’s Armistice Assembly, narrating the horrors of war through poetry, before leading the school and parents to the Remembrance Copse for our own quiet memory of those who gave their lives – the youngest just 14. As always, our top year did themselves proud – the sight of them laying down their poppies at the base of the trees and standing tall and respectful provides a visual representation of the importance of young people being at the centre of remembrance.
