Poppies Men's Tee Shirt

In the summer of 1968, I was thirteen and my family went on holiday to Jersey. We stayed with my grandparents in St Helier. All the adults warned me not to ask Grandad about the Great War. They said that he would not tell me anything and would probably go into one of his ‘moods’. The first time we were alone together, I asked him … and he told me. For about an hour, I listened Grandad’s memories of The Somme. The steady tick of the clock marked frequent pauses, when he stopped to gather his thoughts. He told me that some explosions reduced men to a fine red mist, which was carried high in the updraft. Some of his mates said poppies would grow where the mist settled. Over forty years later, I painted ‘Poppies’. Lyn Davies.