1 minute read
A Family Reunited
By Michael Flounders
In 1988 whilst playing with my children in my garden in Suffolk an attempted somersault went disastrously wrong, the devastating injuries left me with a broken neck and facing the rest of my life as a wheelchair user. The accident itself left me, an ex army man feeling as though my life was over and with no strength to go forward. Since breaking my neck, my whole life has been a challenge. The first thing that came to me was the want and the need to fight back and do some things for others to inspire them to live life to the full. After major rehabilitation I came home from Stoke Mandeville hospital and started rebuilding my life. Reflecting back on my life, I remembered the story. …. when I was about 5 years old, on a fishing trip with my Yorkshire born father, his family all lived and grew up in Redcar and the surrounding villages. He told me about my uncle, Ernie, (his brother) who died at the age of 26. He was stationed as a field medic out in Burma in the Second World War. His body was never found. As a result my nanny did not want to believe she had lost her son, so she kept all his things at home in hopes he would return. He never did and her dying wish was that Uncle Ernie would be remembered.
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With military records more available I researched to discover more about his death and tried to rebuild the story behind it. I contacted the Royal British Legion who did guided tours for general public and war veterans to travel out to Burma to pay their respects and recapture the spirit of loved ones lost. It was incredible. They found his name and date of his disappearance which was at the height of the monsoon season. This tied up with the story my father had told me of how, when evacuating casualties from the front, he was carrying a stretcher across a ravine, whereupon the bridge collapsed and he was swept away with the casualty.
Elizabeth (my partner), myself and a group of other travelers went out to Burma, with Remembrance Travel to pay our respects. We hoped to lay a wreath on his grave, taking with us, stones from nanny’s grave to place upon his and bring stones back from Burma to place on her grave in Redcar to reunite them.
