They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them

The inspiration for this painting was a friend’s reminiscences of his grandfather. He remembered his hours of silent contemplation in his allotment, where he was visited by his lost comrades.

Our understanding of PTSD starts with WW1. The psychological impact of life in the trenches was badly misunderstood. Initially the effects were thought to be physiological due to proximity to shells exploding – hence the term shell shock or treated as evidence of cowardice and malingering. In some tragic cases even leading to execution.

One of the problems after that war, and all conflicts, is the difficulty of talking to people about what happened. What do people who were not there actually want to hear? While relatives want details of t ime and place in order to make meaning out of their loss, do they want to know that the loved one’s body had been blown apart, or had lain rotting unburied for days? There is a ‘natural tendency to repress, being in my experience almost universally fostered by … relatives and friends’ [W H Rivers].

The title is drawn from Laurence Binyon’s iconic poem “For the fallen”: