A Nation Respects

It was 50 years ago today that Winston Churchill was given a state funeral.

Like so many people, I have watched and been moved by the BBC documentary that recaptured this event, even speaking to many of the people that took part in some way and yet remain alive to speak of this important moment of national mourning.

I am shocked by the news that a recent survey of British students revealed that they had almost no knowledge about this man.

The most telling thing was that most students associated Churchill with the bulldog that has been the advertising device of an insurance company.

It is unfortunate that I was not one of those people surveyed about their knowledge of who this man was.

But of course, I am in my early 50s, and perhaps an unusual interest in such history, because my parents were of that generation that lived through the war and that Britain fought, at first alone, although always with the critical resources of the then British Empire to draw upon.

My father died in 1998, many years ago now, but my mother remains alive at the grand age of 95.

This I suppose I have had a direct connection to that struggle and to the way in which it has affected the lives of the generation that lived through it.

My father was a dock worker, commencing work within the Port of London authority when he was little more than 14 years of age.

As a dock worker, he had very particular reasons to perhaps mistrust Churchill, but in my father’s case I never heard this view expressed.

On the contrary, though a reserved occupation during the war, he and several others that were colleagues working in the docks, joined up as soon as war was declared, and in his case, he spent the next nine years in the forces, finally being mobilised from Palestine in 1948.

He and my mother had only married in 1938, no doubt because of the crisis that he would have laid down his life for.

The way my father told it to me was that by so doing, rather than waiting for conscription to call upon men like him, he was able to have more choice about how he could serve.

As a consequence of which, he served in the Royal Engineers, remaining throughout his service a private, and although briefly promoted to lance corporal, he was a private when demobilised.

I never did quite understand the reasons behind this, but besides a small number of simple stories he spoke little about his experiences.

It must have been hard for both of them to have spent the first 10 years of marriage separated because of the war, and there is no doubt that his experiences were behind his lifelong passion for pigeon racing, a solitary hobby that he shared with so many men that had served as he had.

Living within easy reach of the docks in which he worked, at the heart of East London, my mother was perhaps fortunate to have been engaged in war work which took her away from the constant bombing of that part of London.

At one stage she worked in an armaments factory somewhere in the Home Counties, and later moved to Lancashire where close to Blackpool she worked as a lathe operator.

He spoke of many different theatres of war, particularly of the desert war against Rommel.

He was at Tobruk, and rather than becoming involved in the D-Day invasion, he was part of the second and lesser known invasion through Italy that was part of the pincer movement to trap the axis powers through a second front.

I could not fail to become interested in the history of this struggle because of my parents part in it, and when I was quite young, I remember reading his doctors account of Churchill’s last years.

There is another reason why I have an interest in this moment of history, so much talked about, and so important to the national consciousness.

My father was one of 12 brothers and sisters, brought up in the east end of London to a typical working-class family.

One of his sisters married a man who was up until Churchill’s funeral in receipt of a small pension.

The family story does not go into too much detail, but apparently this arose from an indiscretion on the part of a member of the Marlborough family with someone that was in service at Blenheim Palace.

This particular branch of my family lived somewhere in Wiltshire, and were the only part of the family to have been able to make something of their lives, perhaps with the assistance of this pension.

With so many people in service in Britain during the 19th and 20th centuries, I am sure that there are numerous families that have some similar story somewhere in their ancestry.

But it is something that today’s anniversary reminds me of, and doubly so as I watched the way the cranes dipped to honour the passing of his funeral barge along the Thames.

Literary Lodestones

You do not forget the good books that you discover.

Especially if they lead you to poignant emotional moments, and this has been a surprising recent discovery for me, and though until recently I had thought that my literary adventures were over, since I cannot even hold a book nor turn its pages, audio books have had a sudden resurgence thanks to such initiatives as Audible.

I had not even heard of the author of the two books that have recently had such an impact on me.

It is worth me describing briefly how I happened to suddenly discover the first, and thence discover the other.

I find the problem of choosing what to read as much of a difficulty as I ever did.

I was always an avid reader, and when I think back, so many of the good books that I have discovered have come to me almost by accident.

Perhaps this was a semi-conscious decision, when as a very young boy, I realized that it would be impossible for me to read every book in a big library.

And so I prepared myself to discover books by some form of serendipity.

On this occasion, I had quite  simply  chosen to read Max Hastings history of bomber command during the Second World War.

I didn’t expect this overview to be without its controversy, but at least I was partially aware of that controversy. Perhaps it was time that I discovered more.

Even before I settled down to listen to this weighty tome, I chose in addition the first of the two books by Elizabeth Wein that are the principal subject of this article.

The reasoning for this is similarly accidental, in that I was attracted by its title. Code Name Verity.

This suggested some connection with the Second World War, and with a part of it that is of interest to me because it is a component of an extended piece of writing that I have begun. Perhaps, I thought, this might shed some light by way of research on what I am trying to achieve.

And so I did not begin to read Code Name Verity at once, but only after I had completed Max Hastings fascinating book.

I have always found books that involve flight fascinating. I can immediately think of The Little Prince, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

The author of Code Name Verity is a pilot herself, and the heroine of the book is a pilot too.

Being set as it is, the protagonist of the story becomes a member of the air transport authority, the only way perhaps that a woman would be able to fly in wartime Britain.

This would almost be sufficient in itself, but an extraordinary tale unfolds when she is introduced to special operations, that secret world of moving people and resources so that they can play an important part in a lesser known aspect of that total war.

I’m not going to explain much of the story as it unfolds, because that should be for an interested reader to discover.

Sufficient to say that having accidentally discovered this book, and being thereby introduced to Rose On Fire as another work by the same author, I have at last come to the work that has so affected me.

Although they are quite distinct works and could be read separately, having read them in the order that I did was important.

In other words, characters appear in both of these books, and there is an important sense of development between them.

The plot of this second book is quite exceptional, and incredibly well handled.

Once again, I won’t go into details, other than to explain that the title character, Rose Justice, is also an air transport pilot, this time American.

Through a carefully balanced plot, she finds herself over France, after the liberation of Paris, and before the end of the war.

She ends up being brought down by two German fighter planes, whilst flying a Spitfire, and of course because it is a transport plane, it is not armed.

She is forced to land at a German airfield, and becomes a captive. As a consequence of which, because she is a woman and a suspected agent, she spends six months in a concentration camp.

She survives, and in giving the authors own background as to how the book came to be written, it is clear that it came about as a consequence of writers workshops which took place at the location of the camp, almost a generation later.

In other words, it is a well researched fictional story, but with an extraordinary connection with the modern day location of that terrible place.

The story is told after she has escaped from the camp with a small group of survivors, and culminates with the end of the war and by no means resolves all of the questions concerning the future of important characters.

But it is a story that in its telling reiterates the importance of its telling, so that we can never forget.

It is rare that I have found a book to be quite so emotionally compelling, and for that reason, it must be recommended.

It isn’t an easy book to read at times, and perhaps that is the mark of a great work.

Certainly a book that for me has been transformative.

Deep Inside Popular Culture

There can be hidden depths sometimes to popular culture.

One of the strangest that comes to mind is something that may be vaguely apparent to many people, as it relates to one of the most popular films from the past 30 years.

Apocalypse Now is a strange film in parts, about the desire for the military administration to put an end to a rogue Cololel who ‘has gone native’ somewhere in Vietnam.

The soldier sent to fulfill the mission of the government eventually locates Kurt where he has set himself up as some kind of reclusive deity.

It is a film full of strangeness, and perhaps nothing is stranger than the talk between the Hunter and the Hunted in the darkness of
 the cave at the end of the film where Kurt very much makes a willing sacrifice of himself, and makes it clear that he has been expecting this confrontation.

Anyone that is particularly interested in cinematic imagery may be aware that the camera pans across some of the books in his library at the very end, as if to give an insight into the extraordinary thinking of this extraordinary man.

One of the books that appears only in one or two frames as the camera moves through the cave is James Frazer’s  extraordinary anthropological work, ‘The Golden Bough’ which is as its title proudly announces a treatise on magic and religion, and it remains today one of the most important works on the anthropology of ancient man.

The second book that is also clearly visible if you take the trouble to look frame by frame is a little known work that will be unfamiliar to most people entitled ‘From Ritual to Romance’, by Jessie L. Weston. One of the reasons why this book has been so little read is that it is an academic work that is hard work, and not for the fainthearted.

I have taken the time to read it, and it is fascinating. It looks at the Arthurian legends and relates them to the previously existing pagan legends as far back as Babylonian vegetation myths.

In other words, as it was written in about 1920 it is not so different in subject matter to the content of Frazer’s work.

Both books together, along with other works such as the Bible, shed interesting light on the nature of what might be uppermost in the mind of the soldier that has gone native.

Few films have so entered into a sense of the culture of the 20th century as this extraordinary work, and I think it is worth making some exploration of those depths to which it seeks to explore.