At junior school (I was 10)
we had a period devoted to community singing. We gathered in the hall, the odd lyric on a blackboard, song books some of which seemed to have come from the BBC children’s programming. Older children, younger, all of us ? I can’t remember but we sang together, occasionally cheered on or criticised. This was not a fill in (as in the “Mr.Elson is away so we will be in the Hall for …”). It was on the schedule.
Memory comes and goes, I’m not going to say with age because it always did, personal or collective, triggered by temperature, taste, smell, association of ideas, a word, a gesture, a snatch of music, a sudden revelation -often when you are completely not expecting it.
Sometimes memorial ritual is enacted but slides away into the shadows, recalled perhaps in a context that seems unreasonable years later.
A dear friend’s husband died last week, a long time sufferer from Parkinson’s Disease. They had gone to live in Spain, recommended for PD, second only to the US. And often, the more important people are to you, the harder it is to find the words. So I prayed and I wrote. And I was lucky, she “heard” me.
It fascinates me, what history remembers and what it forgets and when remembrance breaks through, how that may be distorted over time. I read a wonderful novel about the Pilgrimage of Grace. I thought it was made up and darned clever – but no, it was history I had never heard.
History is not a person so the people who come after choose – remember this, just put that aside and this week on VJ Day
at the elegant National Arboretum, tribute was paid to the unsung suffering of the communities of the Far East – which perhaps because many are now independent, and as we say “moved on”, raised the difficult issues of Empire, colonialism, destruction and suffering which are much harder to remember than winning. I’d say surviving all that was another kind of bravery.
The theatre of war in the Far East in WWII touches me because it was the biggest army from India, then not independent or divided, as well as thousands and thousands more. And forgetting them
was a rerun of the small army in WWI in which my father served, in India and Mesopotamia, pushed aside by the catastrophic losses in Europe.
If there is a positive lesson from all this, it is that “this too shall pass.”
We all come to the end. I do hope the resurgence of Christianity among the young will teach a more useful acceptance of the end. Because everything ends. No matter how mighty, every civilization falls – to war or pestilence or geographical infelicity (wrong place, wrong time).
What I loved about my old community singing was the inclusion. I am deeply grateful to my parents, schools and life for teaching me – not that everybody is nice or worthy or you want to be best friends with them – but that we are all human. And humans end.
The pursuit of youth, youth delaying age, delay of age putting off death defines the age we live in, the subject of endless lucrative and often unbecomingly desperate preoccupation – diet and exercise, mental disciplines, sleep, surgery and all the rest. This is a millions miles away from taking reasonable care of yourself and making the best of yourself so that you feel as good as you can to face the day.
There are people who can’t do death. But war or illness doesn’t ask you. It takes. And you are left with whatever it is, to get on with afterwards. John Harlow just didn’t make it (he died in the runup to yesterday’s ceremony). He was on the last surviving submarine laying mines and he said he always thought of his colleague Mark, with whom he had trained, on another vessel . “War doesn’t grant you the luxury of goodbyes” he said, ending “ there’s no pride and no glory. So, forget war and pick peace.”
For the rest of us, life is war, often including dying – and death is peace.
*with thanks to Tolstoy
Annalog 