Peter Headington remembers the sound.

Before you reached the war memorial, before the service began, the band let you know that something important was happening.

"You might not be attending the memorial service, but you'd certainly know that it was on," he says.

Peter has lived locally for more than 50 years. He moved here when he married and settled on Albury Grove Road, near Cheshunt's Old Pond. He remembers it being nicknamed "Struggle Street", then jokes that he is still struggling himself.

When the conversation turns to remembrance, the humour goes quiet. What matters to him is that the community keeps gathering, and that younger people understand why.

He remembers the Royal British Legion procession making its way to the war memorial in the grounds of the Almshouses on Turners Hill. The music reached well beyond the people marching. It carried remembrance into the streets around them.

That is worth holding on to this weekend. A ceremony happens in one place at one time. What it means should travel further.

Memorials in Cheshunt, Waltham Cross, Goffs Oak, Wormley, Hoddesdon and Broxbourne give public shape to losses first felt in private: in households, workplaces and groups of friends.

The three Arnold brothers show what that means. Sidney, Ernest and Tom grew up in Cheshunt and Waltham Cross, the sons of Thomas and Ellen Arnold of Swanfield Road. Sidney, 27, was lost at sea when the troopship Transylvania was sunk on 4 May 1917. Ernest, 28, a Post Office Rifles lance corporal, was killed on 1 June. Tom, 30, of the Suffolk Regiment, died on 15 September. Three sons lost in just over four months. Sidney is remembered in Cheshunt Cemetery, and all three are named on the Cheshunt war memorial at the Almshouses.

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Familiar names on stone can stop meaning anything. These men had homes, jobs and people waiting for them to come back. Ernest was an auxiliary postman. Sidney had worked as a butcher's assistant.

The war did not stay on the front line, either.

On 17 August 1944, a V1 flying bomb destroyed Little Cot Cottage at the junction of Goffs Lane and St Johns Road in Goffs Oak. Members of the Marvell family died, along with visiting relatives and local air raid warden William Ingrem. It was the largest loss of civilian life in Goffs Oak during the war. In August 2025, the Mayor unveiled a plaque on the site to mark the 80th anniversary of VJ Day.

On 2 January 1945, a V2 rocket hit Chadwick & Shapcott's Acorn Works, the brush factory on Waltham Cross High Street, and brought death into an ordinary workplace. The site is now Homebase.

These things did not happen somewhere else. They happened on our own streets.

Some reminders are obvious. Others are so familiar we barely notice them.

Lieutenant Ellis Way is one. Just before 8am on 12 August 1944, a US B-24 Liberator from RAF Wendling in Norfolk lost power and crashed on farmland near Maxwell's Farm, killing all ten men on board. Local people have long believed the pilot, 2nd Lt John D. Ellis, and his crew steered away from the houses of Cheshunt and Waltham Cross rather than bail out. The relief road was renamed in his honour on VE Day's 50th anniversary in 1995, and a memorial stone was unveiled beside St Mary's High School in 2011.

Peter talks about the Liberator memorial with particular interest. To him it is not a distant military story but one that local children are still told, and the school that stands beside it has hosted services there.

In Cedars Park, the replica First World War tank tells a different story. Cheshunt was given a real tank in 1921 in recognition of the town's wartime fundraising. In 1940, with another war under way, it was sold for scrap. Broxbourne Council installed the replica in July 2019, on the original concrete plinth.

There are quieter traces too: pillboxes, anti-tank blocks and the heavy anti-aircraft gunsite at Burnt Farm Camp near Goffs Oak, described as an exceptional survival of its kind. Fields we walk through today were once ready for invasion and air attack.

Put together, these places show how completely war reached into local life.

Peter is encouraged by the presence of young people at ceremonies. He recalls school pupils reading, laying wreaths and taking part alongside cadets and older residents.

His observations have a documented counterpart at Lowewood Museum. At the borough’s Holocaust Memorial Day service in January 2026, local pupils delivered readings under the theme “Bridging Generations”. The ceremony remembered people murdered in the Holocaust and those killed in later genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.

Holocaust Memorial Day and November’s acts of remembrance have distinct purposes and histories. They should not be treated as interchangeable. But both ask an important question of those who gather: how will this knowledge survive beyond the people who carry it today?

Peter puts the concern simply.

“There’ll be a time when a lot of people who are alive now … won’t be around.”

That is why the involvement of children matters. They are not there merely to make a ceremony look complete. They are becoming the people who will decide whether these names, places and stories remain part of the borough’s shared knowledge.

A memorial can survive physically while its meaning fades. Keeping that meaning alive requires explanation, participation and care.

Peter also warns against limiting remembrance to the two world wars. He mentions the Falklands, and the people killed or injured in the conflicts since.

The war memorial in Broxbourne's Station Road Recreation Ground already says this. Beneath its Second World War names is a dedication to all who have fallen in conflicts around the world since 1945. This year Historic England gave the memorial Grade II listing.

Remembrance has room for that ongoing loss without turning every ceremony into an argument about the present. Its first duty is to the people being remembered, and to the families who still live with what happened.

But it is fair to ask what we take home when the ceremony ends.

Asked what message he would leave for future generations, Peter does not reach for anything grand.

"Just … try and get on with … your neighbour."

He explains straight away that he means more than the person next door. He means other people, other countries, and people whose views are different from ours.

"Try to understand what other people feel," he says.

He is not saying differences disappear, or that anyone should give up what they believe. His point is practical. Disagreement does not have to turn into hostility, and understanding someone is not the same as agreeing with them.

Sunday morning, residents will gather again at the borough's memorials. There will be wreaths, familiar words and a shared silence. On Wednesday at 11am, the country falls silent once more.

We should honour those moments. We should also take something of their seriousness back into everyday life: curiosity about the history around us, care for people living with loss, and a determination to pass these stories on.

Peter's instruction is short.

"Never forget. Never forget. Never forget."

The job for the rest of us is to make remembering something we do, not just something we say.

The council has announced the following services for Sunday 8 November 2026.

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Editor-in-chief | Emeka Ogbonnaya

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