Remembrance time makes me remember...

When I went to my Church primary school there were all these rough little boys, the sort who mocked me when I said I wanted to be a ballet dancer when I grew up, who were into the War, and when asked to do drawings were always representing the Battle of Britain in crayon.

I had never heard of the war, so I asked my mother "Mummy, who won the War?"

Bear in mind this was a household taking the Daily Telegraph, regarding the Tories as the natural party of government.

"It was so dreadful," said my mother, "and there was such terrible suffering and loss on both sides that no one really won it."

"O that's all right," I said "that means we won it really."

I also picked up from my mother a distinct distaste for the Remembrance Sunday events.  All those men never going to church in their medals who never go to church for the rest of the year.  (Not that my mother did either, but she has a highly developed sense of pretension.  My own religiosity was probably my own version of teenage rebellion.)

But with hindsight I never realised how dreadful it must have been to live through those years of possibly invasion and air raids.  Remembrance Day events (with whatever municipal pomposity or Vera Lynn, ITMA sentimentality) were one way of coping with that traumatic time.

My mother coped with the memory differently.

And it is funny that the defeat of fascism should be associated with the right of centre in this country.

I never attended Remembrance Sunday does as a child, and only saw them on the TV.  In my experience of churches, a commemoration is made in the course of the normal Sunday service, with two minutes silence not necessarily at eleven.  The sermon is frequently a condemnation of war.

The other distastful aspect was the sentimentality - O wasn't it wonderful in the war, when we had Vera Lynn, Tommy Handley and we all pulled together.

I used to sneer at all this, but I realise it was a way of coping with such terrible circumstances and fear which I doubt whether I could.

A friend of mine who was an evacuee from Bethnal Green (he would have been 8 in 1939) only said once something along the lines of how people say it was wonderful in the war, but it wasn't, it was horrible.

Indeed - quite a lot of what one might collectively describe as the British ruling classes - including the abdicated Edward VIII, and the Daily Mail of course, were strong and uncritical supporters of what Hitler claimed to be doing in Germany.  One of the most telling exhibits in the Holocaust section of the Imperial War Museum is a collage of comment pages from British newspapers - the Daily Mail principal among them - claiming that Britain was being swamped by Jewish immigrants making false claims about being being in danger.  Some things change very little.


This is borne out by what I have heard from my own family and friends - my father send away from London to relatives in County Durham, who looked after him splendidly by all accounts, but hearing reports of the Blitz on the wireless and wondering.  And the story of a splendid nonagerian lady I know, describing how when her husband was wounded on D-Day - he lost a leg - she was pushed from pillar to post by the authorities who wouldn't even tell her when he was returning, and her realisation that for all the obstruction, as the wife of an officer she was being treated immeasurably better than the wives of wounded soldiers in the other ranks.

I don't think anyone is saying that commemorating those who died in war is wrong, or sentimental, just (well this is what I'm saying anyway) that nobody should think that there's anything idealistic or noble about war. Of course it has driven many people to heroic and selfless acts, but how much better the world would have been if those acts had never needed to take place.

Also, the language used at these ceremonies is sentimental and euphemistic. Words like conflict, sacrifice, the fallen are aimed at disguising the bloody squandering of life. Even the poppy symbol adds to the general prettifying of the hideous. I know these things help to spare the feelings of the relations of the dead, but they are dishonest. I'd like to see Laurence Binyon replaced by Wilfred Owen.

Hijacking grief to fuel (I use the word deliberately) political ends constantly goes on.  Look at what happened with the world trade center.  How many relatives of the dead objected to the political use to which the tragedy was put?  It only added to the helpless rage and grief of many to see those deaths being used as a war cry.