Today I walked with a purpose. I turned on the television at 5 to 11 in order to watch the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall at the War Memorial at Balmoral. He laid a wreath, she, some flowers. There was a two minute silence. A piper played. I found the whole thing very moving. Then I set off on my VE Day walk. Being Friday I was remembering the dead anyway. This time I did read the readings said the General Thanksgiving and set out – it seemed obvious in a way – to .the Imperial War Museum.
St George’s Cathedral was my first pause as I knew the Blessed Sacrament would be there. Father Gault, vicar of St Michael and All Angels, Christchurch, New Zealand, taught me that whenever you passed a church where the Blessed Sacrament was reserved you should make the sign of the cross. ‘Even when you’re driving a car, Father?’ ‘Especially when you’re driving a car!’
Then it was into the Tibetan Peace garden. The path to the garden is bordered by a hedge of white roses in full bloom. There was no one else in the circular garden so I did a Buddhist circumambulation – three times around. When my Buddhist friend Panom, who had been a monk at Wat Pho in Bangkok, was writing a text book about Buddhism, in English, for his school pupils I tried to help him with the words and the grammar. For circumambulation we ended up with circumambulation. It’s more than just walking around. You do it three times around a temple. Usually holding an incense stick, a lighted candle and a lotus flower and you are praying, often while the monks are chanting in the temple or there’s a sermon being preached over loud speakers. This morning there were no monks, no candles, no incense no lotus flowers and certainly no sermon but I did manage to pray.
The Peace Garden was a good place to have been before I passed the great guns at the entrance to the War Museum. This time I walked behind the guns and saw the huge shells marking the space. Then I encountered the strange and rather grotesque work ‘Change Your Life’ which turned out to be a painting by the East German artist Jurgen Grosse (INDIANO) on part of the Berlin Wall that had been salvaged after the wall came down. That gave me a chance to remember the German people. After this it was the Russians at the Russian War Memorial where someone had put flowers this morning.
Out onto Kennington Road and some serious remembering. Five of my mother’s six brothers served in Europe and my father’s two brothers his sister and his brother in law. My father couldn’t pass the medical because of an injury to his leg in a motor bike accident. When we had a bath togther – taking turns with my brothers and sisters – he used to let me feel where the bone stuck out a bit. He always felt guilty about not having served as a soldier.
My mother’s youngest brother, Uncle Dave, my Godfather, was too young to join up. Uncle Mick who was the brother my Mother was closest to, she was his designated ‘big sister’, was a prisoner of war and is mentioned in the book ‘The Great Escape’. I think he was due to go into the tunnel when the tunnel was discovered. Uncle Mick died when he was in his fifties. I remembered each of these and the husbands of my mother’s five sisters. I can’t remember which of them served but I think I can remember a photo of Uncle Ed Giesen in uniform. Then I remembered my mother talking about the war and the New Zealand Prime Minister the great Labour Leader Joseph Savage. She remembered his statement of Britain, ‘Where she goes we go. Where she stands, we stand.’ That, she said, was the atmosphere of the time.
My father was a Member of Parliament during the war and one of the duties my mother had, as an MP’s wife was to be with the official party when they farewelled troops before they left to serve overseas. Standing on the stage at one of those farewells she was next to the local Catholic priest who said to her, ‘the sorrows of a mother’s heart no man can tell.’
It was also her duty, this time in her role as president of the local Red Cross, to visit families when they heard the news of the death of a son, a husband or a father. She was only in her early thirties, with four children under ten, and, she told me, she felt totally inadequate. ‘But,’ she said, ‘It was one of those things that had to be done. Someone had to do it so why shouldn’t it be me?’
She told me of going to tell one local farming family of a young man killed in action. His parents were sitting there in the kitchen. The young man’s wife, his widow now, was feeding her baby who was sitting in the high chair. And she had to tell Aunt Molly that both her sons had been killed. Aunt Molly was my father’s aunt. These were my father’s cousins. She was in the kitchen when my mother called. She gave her the news. My mother said that Aunt Molly was silent and simply continued to wipe the kitchen work top over and over again.
Years ago now I was at a dinner and we began to talk about the war. I don’t know why. I realised as the dinner progressed that of the eight of us at dinner all my contemporaries, I was then in my early sixties, five had never known their fathers – they’d been killed in action. One of the men, a Canadian, said that he, when he was 50, had been at a conference in Norway and realising he was near where his father was buried – the father he’d never known – went to find his grave. He found it and looked at the gravestone, the gravestone of a 28 year old. He said he felt like a father looking at the gravestone of his son rather than the other way round.
One of the women spoke with great affection of her stepfather. All with stepfathers said they’d been really loved by them. And then she said, ‘My mother told me how she met my father when he was on leave and they fell in love. On his next leave they married. On the third I was conceived. There never was a fourth. He was killed in Burma.’ Another woman whose mother hadn’t remarried had two brothers. They lived on little money and lots of love. And another of the women remembered screaming in terror when at the age of four a strange man had appeared at home – a gaunt terrifying figure who she was told belonged. It was her father who had been in prisoner of war camp for much of the war. At that dinner we began to talk of the wives and the mothers. The women who had been through all of this and somehow had survived.
I made it, on my walk, up to the top, or bottom whichever way you’re looking at it, of Kennington Road and crossed into Kennington Park. I went to the War Memorial there and spent a moment of quiet before heading to the Civilian memorial to the more than 100 locals, mostly women and children, who were killed in the air raid shelter under Kennington Park when it received a direct hit from a bomb during the Blitz. All in all it was a fairly sobering walk.
Once back home, 6040 steps later, it was time for coffee and the television. The BBC had a VE Day programme that included Winston Churchill’s original 3.00pm broadcast played along with old film footage and recollections from different people, poems and songs from the garden of number 10 Downing Street. Bands from Horse Guards Parade I think. It was a good programme. I know I cry easily. I cried.
I have one memory of World War II. I was four and staying with my Grandmother. I’d over heard the grown-ups talking about how the inter-island ferry had been shadowed by a Japanese submarine in New Zealand waters. My father, as a Member of Parliament, often travelled on the ferry. Now my Grandmother and I used to play at being the Radio, only we called it the wireless. I would be the announcer and my Grandmother would turn the knobs and be the listener. I remember pretending to be the newsreader and saying, ‘Last night the ferry was shadowed by a Japanese Submarine,’ and my Grandmother exclaimed. ‘Oh. Jack was on the Ferry. I do hope he’s all right.’ And I continued the news with ‘And I can inform members of the Acland family that Mr Jack Acland MP is fine’. And my Grandmother said ‘What a relief’. Would that the real news could be so interactive and thoughtful for listeners.
Then, in the evening of VE Day I watched more television. For once I left Poirot and Miss Marple. I chose not to watch another film on Netflix but stayed with the BBC and watched the Queen’s broadcast followed by all sorts of people singing ‘We’ll Meet Again’. And had another cry.