Sunday morning and the house is quiet, so I’ll write a bit for you my readers. You are the ghosts around me, the stardust of my myriad thoughts and I thank you.
I’m a War Child. Nowadays the media show images of little ones dying in war, bewildered in war, wounded in war, alone in war and crying in war. That’s how a War Child is presented to us. I’m looking back over my life in more detail than ever these days and I would definitely use those words to describe my childhood. The Second World War left its impact on a child who was trying to work out what was going on. It was like living in the set of a stage play that was yet to take shape in my mind.
In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. In 1940, rationing was started in the U.K., fishing boats went out to support the evacuation of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain made its mark. In 1941, the Blitzkrieg was extended from Belgium, France and Holland to the U.K. and Pearl Harbour was attacked by the Japanese. In 1942, huge numbers of prisoners were taken by the Japanese and the industrial-scale murders in Auschwitz and other concentration camps were started.
In 1943 I was born in a little market town called Bedford, England. In the same year the Germans surrendered at Stalingrad, Italy was invaded and the Japanese were being fought in Burma.
In 1944 came D-Day and Paris was liberated while the British bombed a monastery at Monte Cassino in Italy.
In 1945, Auschwitz horrors were revealed to the world, Hitler committed suicide in Berlin and the U.S.A. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Now that I realise the impact of this war on the events of my life, you’ll find me returning to them in my writing.
I’ve just been watching a short film by Channel 4 News about the last gardener in Aleppo. Hinnie (our daughter-gardener Inez) sent it to me because she understands me better than I care to know sometimes. After my tears and a second viewing, three things came to mind. The first is Omran Daqneesh, aged five, a beautiful boy in Syria the same age as my beautiful grandson Eric Cook Caka . The second is a memory of the grandfather and granddaughter, (she was maybe nine years old), who came into our garden last year and asked if they could take cuttings from some of the flowers. I wanted to tell them about Dom (our son-gardener who died in 2011), but language stopped me in my tracks and from the old man’s eyes, I could see the cuttings were doing the same thing – I wish I knew where they lived. The third thought was of Oscar Wilde’s short story, ‘The Selfish Giant’.
It was at school in Bedford that I first read this poem. The words that struck me then were “…a white light at the back of my mind to guide me”, and those words have always stayed with me. However, now, as I read the poem against the stage set of my life, I begin to comprehend why he wrote this poem at the height of the Second World War and what the Second World War was doing to Louis MacNeice.
This morning, as I write to you dear readers, they’ve dropped barrel bombs on the children and adults gathered at the funerals of children bombed in Syria earlier this week. “They” – are all of us. I keep reading that ‘the world is watching’. Too much watching and not enough doing. The stage is set for war to be stopped in the name of the 250,000 War Children dying, bewildered, wounded, alone and crying in the besieged towns and villages of Syria.
Prayer Before Birth
I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me.
I am not yet born; console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.
I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of my mind to guide me.
I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.
I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
waves call me to folly and the desert calls
me to doom and the beggar refuses
my gift and my children curse me.
I am not yet born; O hear me,
let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
come near me.
I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze
my humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me like thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the hands would spill me.
Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.
Louis MacNeice
