Uncle Clem's Vase

"She advanced into the room , and thrust the flowers into the vase. It had once belonged to her Uncle Clem, whose funeral, or re-burial, at the end of the war she remembered quite well [...] most memorably for a five-year-old, her father weeping. Clem was his only sibling. The story of how he had come by the vase was told in one of the last letters the young lieutenant wrote home [...] a half destroyed museum [...] the vase was taken from a shattered glass case and presented in gratitude [...] Jack Tallis wanted the vase in use, in honour of his brother's memory [...] If it had survive the war [...] then it could survive the Tallises"