Remembering those who didn't come home

NEIL STUART

- GUY HENDERSON

EVERY year around this time, I take the pocket watch out of the top drawer and wind it up. The little milled wheel turns easily, and the hands spring to life instantly.

A second hand sweeps around a small dial in the centre of its face as the larger, slightly blue-tinged, hands make their way slowly from one Roman numeral to another.

The watch ticks very quietly, but it’s a strangely soothing sound, very different from the sounds going on around it when it first saw action.

It hangs on a simple chain and is nothing much to look at. It has a broad arrow stamped on the back of its case, and the serial number C47868.

And that’s why it comes out every year, and why it is never going to be for sale.

Tens of thousands of them were made around 110 years ago, and they went to war in the pockets of British soldiers marching on to the battlefields of Flanders.

My grandpa George Weaver was one of them. A Bristol boy, he had signed up with the Gloucestershire Regiment and trained as a signaller.