There is a beautiful dichotomy at the heart of Remembrance.
For centuries, composers have written Requiem Masses – Duruflé, Fauré and Mozart among the most well-known – settings that accompany the ancient Latin plea Requiem aeternam: Rest eternal. These works have echoed through churches at this time of year for generations, their poignancy sharpened by All Souls’ Day and Remembrance Sunday & Armistice Day.
I felt this dichotomy intensely on Sunday. The Remembrance Sunday service in Ruyton Parish Church opened with our Boys’ Choir singing Elgar’s haunting setting of For the Fallen – Binyon’s words reminding us of the pity of war, the futility of conflict, and the enduring duty to remember those who paid the ultimate sacrifice. Later that evening, as I sat in St Chad’s in Shrewsbury listening to Fauré’s Requiem, a recent Packwood leaver sang the Pie Jesu solo with extraordinary clarity. Grant them rest – a line that reminds us of the lives whose memory we hold dear. An audio clip can be accessed here.
And yet, alongside this choral tradition stands new, contemporary voices. Anthems that look forwards to renewed life. Howard Goodall’s Love Will Find Out the Way, is one such anthem. Written “as the opposite of a Requiem,” it is not a lament but a celebration. When our Girls’ Choir sang it on Sunday, it offered a moment to see hope. This juxtaposition – between sorrow and hope, between looking back and looking forward – lies at the very heart of what it means to observe Remembrance with young people.
On Tuesday morning, the whole community gathered for our Armistice Assembly and Act of Remembrance. Hector, an Upper Sixth-former from Shrewsbury, piped us from the theatre steps across the fields towards the Remembrance Copse – forty-eight trees planted for the forty-eight Packwoodians who gave their lives in the World Wars. The sound of the pipes drifted across the grounds, a solemn call to look back. As George played the Last Post, our Heads of School, James and Lulie, laid poppies at the foot of each tree – forty-eight living tributes to forty-eight lives once lived.
Every year I am moved by standing before 192 children aged 4 to 13, every one of them honouring the past and quietly representing the future. For a moment, both tenses touch.
But only for a brief moment, for as the children turn and walk back towards school, we switch from the past to the future. The trees behind us stand as guardians of memory – but they also stand as symbols of life. Their roots grow out of remembrance; their branches reach into the future. They remind us that from the sacrifice of others life continues – not unchanged but renewed and made more purposeful.
Goodall’s optimistic anthem captures this spirit:
I am hope and love will find out the way
For our pupils, this message resonates deeply with the Packwood Way: to be respectful, humble and tenacious; to strive to be our best selves. Remembrance is both an act of memory and a call to character: to carry forward the light of those who came before us and let it shine in how we live, learn, and serve.
William Goldsmith
Head of Packwood
