Remembrance

Today is November 11. Remembrance Day when we honour the Veterans who gave their lives in a war.

Where I grew up, in London England, during the 50s, the city was still pock-marked by bombs that had been dropped there during the Blitz. Since I'd never before experienced bomb-sites, my seven-year old self was rather overwhelmed by them, and astonished by the untidiness of the destroyed home-sites.

It never occurred to me, then, that people probably died there, that another little girl and her brothers and sisters might have died, or might have lost their Mother and Father during that bombing raid.

With no personal reference to the horror or war, I was fascinated when neighbourhood friends showed me a way through those parentally forbidden bomb-sites, that would shorten my daily trek to school.  They showed me where to step to maintain a safe route, and warned that a child had been blown up by straying from it. 

As a girl, the havoc that an unexploded missile might wreak should I accidentally tread on one, didn't even enter my mind. Nor did I consider the homes that had been destroyed by those bombs, all those years before I'd even been born.

My worst nightmare was swallowing the tablespoonful of cod-liver oil my Mother forced upon me each morning. Yet, without the sacrifices represented by that forlorn bomb-site, I might not have had that cod-liver oil, nor a school to attend, nor even the freedom to attend it.

My generation takes freedom for granted, and rarely ever stops to consider who paid the piper on our behalf.  But War affects everyone, and many people, besides soldiers pay the price. As the saying goes:

"They also serve who stand and wait" 

What did you do in the war, Mum and Dad?

That was the question many children my age asked, but their parents were reluctant to answer.  As the eldest in my family, my parents had been a lot younger than many Fathers of my neighbouring friends. Their Fathers had been actively involved in "fighting the Hun" in France, or at the Battle of the Bulge. 

Both of my parents had still been teenagers, growing up in Bombay, India during WW2.  Had they been involved in the war only as a terrified spectators?  Not the way they tell it!

My Mother spent much of the year away from the city in her Himalayan private school.  But in 1940, and for every school "holiday" during wartime, Mom volunteered at the hospital where they treated the battlefield wounded, brought into the city for medical care.

Never squeamish, she so abhorred the waste of human flesh, through amputation, that she told her Father she wanted  to become a surgeon. "NO" said Grandfather. No daughter of his would be a surgeon. And since his word was LAW, Mom later studied to become a teacher instead.

My Father had completed secondary school by 1942, and although he was old enough to join the armed forces, was denied that experience because of his poor eyesight. Instead, thickly bespectacled Dad articled as an accounting clerk at the Bombay Docks in the latter days of World War 2, where he survived many air-raids, simply because his youthful legs could quickly carry him away from the carnage.  But he told me horror stories about those whose legs were not as swift.

From his dockside office, the 18 year old young man, who was to become my Father, got more than a glimpse of the effects that war can have on the average person. Many of the ships in the Bombay docks carried raw cotton, bound for England's mills before being shipped to other war zones, to replenish clothing, bedding and bandages.

Whenever a cotton ship was bombed, it exploded beyond violently, sending contorted white-hot sheets of metal flying in all directions.  Those working on the docks ran for their lives, the minute the air-raid siren sounded. 

But some were not speedy enough.  Dad reports seeing three men running from a white-hot, flying m-shaped curve of metal that cleared the heads of the two outer fellows, but decapitated the man in the middle. That poor man's legs kept running for a few seconds longer, till his headless, lifeless body dropped to the ground.

Both of this man's companions survived, but their glossy black hair turned white from the shock of witnessing their friend's gruesome sudden death. Then Dad explained that, as awful as those dockside explosions and their aftermath had been, battlefield experiences were more unspeakably violent and gory.

Today, I am remembering those in my own family who have been directly, and indirectly, involved in war. We are indebted to those who have sacrificed their lives through war, to maintain the freedoms of and for future generations. May the light of their courageous souls shine gratefully in our hearts forever.

• My English Grandfather fought in Crimea in 1917 during WW1, during the collapse of czarist Russia. He was demobbed in Bombay, where he met and married my Grandmother who later gave birth to my Dad. Grandfather was to suffer the after-effects of physical ailments and shell-shock for the rest of his life.
• My Father, excused duty for medical reasons, had lived through the continual bombing of Bombay Docks. He rarely talked about those experiences. Yet the war definitely affected his parenting ability and style. Out of necessity, Dad's freedoms had been curtailed during his teens. As a Father, he was unable to understand and unwilling to sanction my own teenage quest for "freedom". The strain of raising three such willful daughters was evidently too much for him, since Dad died shortly before my 16th birthday.
• My Generation had the luxury of peace and Greenpeace in which to protest war and warmongers. But we rarely thought about how that peace had been hard won - or by whom. Beyond that bombsite of my early days, and what came into our living room via the TV - or from the letters of my American pen-pal, war did not seem to, personally, affect me.
• Coming full circle, after 50 years of peace in the West, the next generation is now free to exhibit a love of war "games". By combing army surplus stores, my son kitted himself out and enjoyed many an afternoon of pitting his team against another team set both bent on mock annihilation on a wooded hillside in Langley, near Vancouver, BC.  I wonder if he realizes the irony of his recreational choice?

I hope my children, their friends - and our ruling elite - realize that our freedoms have been pre-purchased for us by real soldiers, airmen and sailors, young men and women who paid the ultimate price so that we can now live life as we see fit.  Regardless of how distasteful the concept may be, it is why western children can now safely "play" at "war games" instead of fighting a "war to end all wars".

I pray also that children who must fight every day, just to survive in our commercially obsessed world will soon enjoy the same Freedoms that our own offspring now take for granted.

Practising gratitude will open your own heart and the hearts of others

And open hearts have no need of war

Namaste