Tommy: A Remembrance Day reckoning

Terry Douglas Norris reflects on Sarnia’s Tommy memorial, his father’s wartime service and the stories veterans carried in silence.

I stand before Tommy. I should know everything about him. All Sarnians and Canadians should. Every schoolchild. Every Gen X, Y and Z. Every retiree.

I do not know the story of Tommy. Shameful.

More shameful, as I stand in front of Tommy, is to think that someone could damage the statue and steal its replica rifle. The rifle was replaced in 2021 with support from the Sarnia-Lambton Building Trades. Thank you, good people of Sarnia, for helping restore Tommy. Good always triumphs.

Tommy, of course, is the bronze soldier in Veterans Park, standing in perpetual silence over the granite etched with the names of the fallen.

I did not know why the statue was named Tommy. I did not know how many names are etched below. I did not know how long Tommy has been the crowning sentinel of our Sarnian war heroes. I had to research it.

Tommy was sculpted in 1921 and added to the cenotaph in 1922. In 2019, 26 more names were unveiled after local historian Tom Slater brought his research to the Sarnia Historical Society, which worked with the local Legion branch to add them.

This year, I will know the statue’s name: Tommy, last name Atkins. But Tommy Atkins was not a real person. He was the fictional archetype British military used for decades to demonstrate paperwork, uniforms and more. Every soldier started out as a Tommy, at least on paper.

Public reckoning over neglecting soldiers has a long history. In 1892, Rudyard Kipling captured the hypocrisy in his poem Tommy: the common soldier is treated poorly during peace, only to be appreciated when war threatens.

But my own reckoning is different. It is a reckoning of real flesh and blood: my father, Tommy Norris.

Tommy Norris volunteered, trained in Canada, landed in Antwerp and fought north through Belgium and Holland. He was shelled and wounded by shrapnel. I know it was November 1944. I know he did not leave Toronto’s Christie Street Hospital until 1946. I know his brother Dick was hit in the hip by sniper fire. That is all I know about my father’s sacrifice.

Like Tommy the statue, my dad did not speak of war. He did not boast. He locked the horrors away to protect his family, hoping his three boys would never go to war.

Before the war, he was a star athlete. Afterward, he refused to wear his leg braces. Young Tommy did not want people to see him as crippled, and he accepted a desk job to make a living.

Here lies my own shame: I stood in front of a living hero and never truly knew the full depth of what he did. I could say he died when I was only 24, and was sick when I was 19. But I saw the damaged leg. I held pieces of shrapnel from operations that continued into the 1960s. I felt the greatness he carried, but never knew the stories.

How can any of us understand what the war cost our families when so much of what our veterans lived through went untold?

Tommy took it all to the grave. Stories gone. Our veterans collectively owned that burden, silently proud and bound by an experience no civilian could fully comprehend. I remember the special spiritual weight in the heavy silence of gathered veterans at early Remembrance Days.

We have reduced the flesh-and-blood sacrifice of veterans to a polite hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Statues do not bleed or suffer from PTSD, but both Tommys stand in silence representing the horrible memory of war.

Let us prove Kipling’s bitter truth wrong.

I do not know all the stories, but I know the message. Canada was forged with the real flesh and blood of soldiers in two world wars. I will not forget Tommy.