THERE are nearly 80,000 poppies, each in memory of a fallen soldier, pinned on the walls of Stockton's Don Bar.

It's a deeply impressive, even dramatic, tribute to our nation's war dead. And yet somehow it's the smaller, less spectacular, individual, much-loved, family mementoes and photographs dotted around the place that move the spirit.

Military families travel from across Britain to leave those tragic keepsakes. Usually they're to remember one of our fallen, sometimes they're something of particular historic value.

Today, the day before the centenary of The Somme, a family has come up from South Yorkshire with what looks like an ordinary, everyday Union Flag. And that's exactly what it is. Except that flag was flown with pride on the desperate, bloody battlefield of the Somme by a brave 16-year-old child.

The Northern Echo: REMEMBRANCE: Julie Cooper from the Don Bar in Stockton, centre, with Tracey and Jill Dennington, relative of Henry William Dennington, who have loaned his Union flag from the Somme to the bar. Picture: TOM BANKS
REMEMBRANCE: Julie Cooper from the Don Bar in Stockton, centre, with Tracey and Jill Dennington, relative of Henry William Dennington, who have loaned his Union flag from the Somme to the bar. Picture: TOM BANKS

That boy was Henry William Dennington.

By the time he carried the flag on the Somme killing ground he had already, illegally, served for two years in the Norfolk Regiment after lying about his age.

He was to lie about his age many years later, this time pretending to be younger than he was, so he could serve his country once again in the RAF in the Second World War.

The flag was Henry's personal property and he took it to some of the most important battles in world history.

It was neatly packed away in a box with his medals for well over half a century until today when it was carefully hung behind the bar at The Don.

Just one more war time keepsake from just another British family at just another pub.

Today, inside the dark bar and outside in the bright sun at the free barbecue all the talk is of The Somme.

War re-enactors, surprisingly young and female, come in with replica weapons that would have been used at the great battle. People pay to light candles in memory of the fallen, proceeds naturally going to the Royal British Legion.

Round the corner on Stockton's famously wide High Street, there's wartime songs, yet more re-enactors and classic military vehicles.

Casual shoppers mingle with enthusiasts to see and hear a military band in full regalia play.

There's a kind of romanticism about war remembrance and it is the same here. The uniforms, the poppies, the books of war poems.

But at The Don Bar, there's something else too: a remembrance of war's brutal reality. Today's soldiers, men and women who have fought in Afghanistan and Iraq regularly pay pilgrimage here. Not in some foreign field, but an ordinary pub in an ordinary northern working town. Many of the photographs on the walls show young people, young military men and women, who would still be in their 20s if they hadn't been killed.

It helps one remember that those Somme soldiers from 100 years ago were young and vital with whole lifetimes to look forward when they fell. The same story just 100 years apart.