IT was Remembrance Sunday yesterday. I wore my poppy with pride and walked through the old cemetery to pause in front of some of the gravestones which mark those who died in two world wars.

It's easy now to look back on those dark days and admire the courage that inspired our young men.

But few of us can have even the slightest understanding of what it must have been like.

I want to tell, briefly, today of just two of those young men.

One was Lieutenant Edward Deakin Ashton, whose wealthy parents lived in the magnificent Ellerslie in spacious grounds off Bury Fold Lane.

The other was my grandfather, Private John Albert Harwood, who lived in a humble terraced house across town in a soot-grimed and cobbled street off Sudellside.

They didn't know each other of course; they came from different worlds.

They had nothing in common except that they were both Darwen lads.

But the Great War took them both and their deaths are marked by memorials close by each other in the cemetery.

Lt Ashton, in his 20s, was killed on the very first day of the Battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916, leading a dawn attack on the bloody hell that was Thiepval Ridge and his body lies somewhere by the banks of the now peaceful Ancre river.

He has an impressive memorial in Darwen cemetery, fortunately not flattened in the name of "elf 'n' safety", and every summer I take my two older grandchildren there and we spend an hour clearing the weeds and tidying up.

Perhaps my grandfather was even less fortunate. He survived the war before dying of his wounds six years later.

His left knee had been shattered by machine gun bullets and the leg had been pinned with two long carpenter's nails hammered through the bones.

He died in agony from blood poisoning, leaving four children and a young widow.

My six-year-old granddaughter was asking at the weekend about the poppies many people were wearing.

Her cousin, now 14, explained their significance.

I had taught her John McCrae's wonderful poem when she was much younger and she recited it to the little one, who will one day understand.

In Flanders field the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

But she did understand the tears in my eyes as I listened to them talking about the poem and she came and put her arms around me.

I told her about my grandpa. I told her he had been very brave.

We went on to talk about the damage which some scrotes had caused to the slide and the carousel at the playing fields where she likes to go with her little friends. "Why did they do that?" she asked.

I couldn't begin to explain. How do you draw a contrast, for a child, between the ignorant young scum of today and the brave Darwen lads of yesteryear?