Remember.

Poppy day in the UK has passed in the last few days so from now until November 11th poppies will be on sale and people will wear them. I was raised in a family that had mixed feelings about poppies. My mother wore a red one my father a white one. I have since those days shown my deepest respect to both understandings and both sides of this debate.

So do not be surprised if you see more poppies from me, I always love painting them, of both varieties.

Sitting on my study floor as I write is the red poppy wreathe that will be laid at the memorial. There are many many ways of remembering and all should be respected.  But here is a tale of a strange kind of remembrance that I find very moving.

It was a deep sense of gratitude that prompted an old man to visit an old broken pier on the eastern seacoast. 

Every Friday evening, until his death in 1973, he would return, walking slowly and slightly stooped with a large bucket of shrimp. The seagulls would flock to this old man, and he would feed them from his bucket. Why?

Because many years before, in October 1942, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker was on a mission in a B-17 to deliver an important message to General Douglas MacArthur in New Guinea. But there was an unexpected detour which would hurl Captain Eddie into the most harrowing adventure of his life.

Somewhere over the South Pacific the Flying Fortress became lost beyond the reach of radio. Fuel ran dangerously low, so the men ditched their plane in the ocean. 

For nearly a month Captain Eddie and his companions would fight the water, and the weather, and the scorching sun. They spent many sleepless nights recoiling as giant sharks rammed their rafts. The largest raft was nine by five. The biggest shark ten feet long. 

But of all their enemies at sea, one proved most formidable: starvation. Eight days out, their rations were long gone or destroyed by the salt water. It would take something special to sustain them. 

That something special happened.  In Captain Eddie's own words, 

"Cherry," that was the B- 17 pilot, Captain William Cherry, "read the service that afternoon, and we finished with a prayer for deliverance and a hymn of praise. There was some talk, but it tapered off in the oppressive heat. With my hat pulled down over my eyes to keep out some of the glare, I dozed off." 

Back to Captian Rickenbacker talking "Something landed on my head. I knew that it was a seagull. I do not know how I knew, I just knew. Everyone else knew too. No one said a word, but peering out from under my hat brim without moving my head, I could see the expression on their faces. They were staring at that gull. The gull meant food...if I could catch it." 

The rest, as they say, is history. Captain Eddie caught the gull. Its flesh was eaten. Its intestines were used for bait to catch fish. The survivors were sustained and their hopes renewed because a lone seagull, uncharacteristically hundreds of miles from land, offered itself as a sacrifice. 

You know that Captain Eddie made it.  And now you also know that he never forgot. Because every Friday evening, about sunset...on a lonely stretch along the eastern seacoast you could see an old man walking white-haired, bushy-eyebrowed, slightly bent. His bucket filled with shrimp was to feed the gulls to remember that one which, on a day long past, gave itself without a struggle like manna in the wilderness.  

Remembrance is and always will be a very personal and moving matter for every individual and each act of remembrance will be filled with many memories and each and every one must be respected even if it is of a seagull.