Mother of killed soldier wants support for memorial art

Feb 24 2009 by David Whetstone, The Journal

Elsie was working in an old people’s home when Sharron died. She had watched a Remembrance Day parade with some of the residents before returning home.

“I had my feet up when there was a knock at the door.

“Colin (Elsie’s husband) went to answer it and in came this bloke. I knew what he had come for but I didn’t know who for (two of Elsie’s four sons were also serving in the armed forces).

“I didn’t think it would be Sharron. You don’t expect a woman to be killed, that’s the bottom of it.

“I didn’t want any of them to have been killed because it would have been the same whichever one of them it was.”

The bringer of bad tidings was from the Army.

“It was his first time, bless him. He stood there in his civvies and he had this black briefcase. Mark, he was called. I said, ‘Thank you, Mark’. He came back next day and he didn’t have to.”

Elsie draws comfort from the fact that Sharron was doing a job she loved and at which she excelled.

She had joined the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME) in 1991 and became only the second woman to qualify as an aircraft technician.

She then joined the Intelligence Corps and began working undercover, saving many lives, Elsie has been told. Elsie says Sharron was popular with her comrades. “They called her their diamond geezer girl,” she recalls.

After her death they chipped in to buy a sundial memorial which stands in Cyprus but can be moved with each posting. Sharron is also commemorated in a garden of remembrance at Chicksands, the Bedfordshire headquarters of the Intelligence Corps.

But outside the military, service deaths can become statistics.

Among many sources of anger and frustration which make grief harder to bear is the perception that deaths in action seem to have dropped down the TV news schedule. “Isn’t it important any more?” says Elsie.

Paradoxically, as the roll of honour lengthens, the loss of an individual soldier seems less worthy of headlines.

Steve McQueen’s stamps, she suggests, will help to keep the sacrifices being made – by soldiers and their families – in the public eye.