One Hundred Years

If my mother-in-law Molly was still alive she would have had her one hundredth birthday today. She died some years ago, 2011 I think. Reflecting on this I realized that I'm 66 and two thirds years old about right now. That's two thirds of one hundred. I won't make a hundred most likely but it makes me acutely aware that a hundred years really is so little time in history. I first met Molly forty years ago in 1979 so she would have been 60 years old, six younger than I am now. I went round to meet Lib's parents as we had made arrangements for a trip to the US and Canada and I felt it appropriate. Lib and I married less than two years later. As time passed I developed a strong affection for Moll and Bill. Bill died September 2000.

I'm reading Peter Fitzsimons book 'Victory at Villers Bretonneux' in which he details this important stage of WW1. My grandfather Walter Edgar Wilson, mum's father, was there as a member of the 57th Battalion. This took place a little over one hundred years ago, in 1918. At this time 100 years ago Ed, as he was known, was in England still and returned to Australia some time later in 1919.

When Fitzsimons describes the scene in the French countryside where literally millions of men lined up at close quarters intent on destroying each their opposition, of early aircraft with machine guns crossing into enemy territory to shoot all the horses they could find to prevent the enemy using them to move artillery as attacks were mounted, of poison gas shells that burnt men's lungs out if they didn't get their masks on quickly, it leaves me with horror and amazement. My mind boggles when I think of the advances in aircraft and armaments in the following 100 years. The war to end all wars certainly did not.

When I was a young boy we lived in Virginia Street Mt Waverley. It was a gravel road and there were paddocks between our house and the railway station which my father used to walk or run across to catch the train to work. The primary school had a market garden next door that still used draught horses. This sixty years ago, in my lifetime, about the time grandfather Edgar or Poppa Wilson as we called him, died of a heart attack, on the day he closed his grocer shop in Glen Iris for the last time, finally retiring. He didn't make it home and crashed his truck through someone's front fence as he had the attack ot the wheel.

His widow Annie, our 'Nanna Wilson', lived at Emerald with my parents for 23 years from 1972 before dying in a nursing home in 1996, aged 99.

Pardon me sharing my thoughts of the day, but as I approach old age there's more to reflect on, and somehow everything just seems so bizarre and amazing.