Cycling Through a Foreign Field

A cycle ride through the First World War battlefields of Flanders and The Somme

In an overheated room in a sheltered housing complex in Burnley there is a small, carved wooden box. The box is a depository for memories, half remembered or forgotten entirely. Inside this box are two life times of old photographs, some sepia, some black and white, known and unknown ancestors; and laid carefully on top of them all sits a newspaper clipping, faded and torn at the edges, over one hundred years old now.

The clipping was taken from the Burnley Express which in 1916 was running a regular feature of Burnley families and the contributions they were making to the First World War. The clipping shows eight head and shoulder photographs of mother and father and six of their sons. One son is in a reserved occupation, one son is too young to fight. The other four sons are in uniform, serving soldiers in the Great War.

The occupant of this hot, stuffy little room and keeper of this box of memories is a lady in her late eighties, frail now and suffering from Alzheimer's Disease, her memory is fading like the contents of the box. She is my mother, Rose. The youngest son in the old newspaper clipping is her father.

In spring 2018 my partner and I set out to cycle the battlefields of Flanders and The Somme; to retrace our forefathers’ footsteps and to find out a little of where they served, the conditions they endured and what had become of them during the First World War.