For Fred and Len and their peers at the British Legion, most of whom were called up towards the end of the Second World War, it is an activity of sweet sadness, in which the past and the present intermingle. Over brews of strong sweet tea they recall the names of dead comrades, and tell tall barrack-room tales of the despatch rider who was a bookies’ runner, or the private who was pushed too far and shot the adjutant. For them memory is an affirmation of their identity.After the meeting with the cadets, they went on to their welfare committee to consider requests for assistance from old soldiers and their dependents Before them were two cases. One concerned a soldier’s widow who needed an alarm installed that would ring in her relatives’ home. The other was that of a soldier invalided out of the Army after being shot in the spine and paralysed; in the intervening years he had led a life of fierce independence, despite his wheel-chair, but old age meant he now needed a hoist to get him into bed at night. Thus do the tentacles of the past reach into the here and now.Yet soon this generation will be gone.

After them will the process of remembrance disappear or be transmuted into something else? At first, when I spoke in their Macclesfield barrack to the young cadets, it seemed that it might be doomed to wither away. Their understanding of the memorial seemed acquired by dutiful rote and was unassimilated into anything meaningful “We honour those who died,” said one 16-year-old girl. “We remember those who sacrificed their lives so that we could live in freedom,” said another cadet. “We remember not just the two world wars but the 70 other conflicts in which British soldiers have served since 1945,” said a younger boy.”The transmission of childhood memories over two or three generations gives family stories a power which is translated at times into the activity of remembrance,” Jay Winter had written.I was not quite sure what he meant But then one 14-year-old spoke up “I remember my grandad,” he said “I was up in the loft and I found his medals So I asked my grandma He was in Burma. His brother, who was with him, was badly wounded and in so much pain that my grandfather had to shoot him rather than leave him to the Japanese.”He had to kill his own brother My grandma told me.

That’s why I will be going to church on Sunday.” He spoke without adornment of the bald facts, but not without emotion. The two old soldiers in the room stood and listened in stunned silence.Suddenly the other cadets looked at their friend with wide eyes. Perhaps we do not yet know what our annual act of remembrance is to become, in Macclesfield or, indeed, anywhere else.I had an interesting lesson in the psychology of giving this week. At the end of my visit to the British Legion in Macclesfield, one of the veterans suggested that the only way to understand public attitudes to Remembrance Day was to spend an hour selling poppies in the street. Thus it was that I found myself in the entrance to Sainsbury’s with a tray of poppies round my neck.”You don’t sell poppies; people buy them,” said Company Quartermaster Sergeant Frank Fraser, 75, who was until this year the Poppy Appeal organiser in the town. “And don’t shake the tin,” said his successor, Sergeant Fred Baker. “It’s bad form.” But selling poppies is not a passive activity.