Kohima and Imphal

Go on, Google on them, I'd never heard of these places either.

Among the odd items I was trying to persuade Dad to throw away was a simple engagement diary for 2009.  No, I need that, he said.

To prove its importance he turned to a page of notes at the back.  Most of it was taken up with words he'd copied from the Remembrance Sunday liturgy -They shall not grow old etc, and When you go home, tell them of us and say.  But the words "Kohima" and "Imphal" were written there too, with nothing to explain them.

They are WWII battlefields in north-eastern India, where the Japanese suffered some of their most significant losses and were driven back into Burma.  Dad would know all about that: he was called up in 1942 and sent to Burma the following year.  My guess is that he'd been watching some TV programme which triggered the memory and at that point he wrote down the two words in the old diary.  But that's all he wrote.  it's as though labelling a memory was the same as describing it in full detail, and that to lose the label, or the particular place where the label had been written, was to lose the entire content of the memory itself.  He had to keep the diary in order to hang on to the memory, although the diary contained nothing but the place names.  So I wrote them on a separate piece of paper for him, after which he was quite content for me to throw the diary away.  Weird.