Many years ago today in 1954 (only 9 years later), rationing ended in this country, a legacy of war.
This afternoon’s Television film was “Went the Day well?” One of those old wartime films that reminds us of the reason that we had to endure tiny portions and habits of scrimping that obliterated our national cuisine.
We were a nation at war. There were only 21 years between the two world wars, even the people on the “home front” of “Went the Day well?” Had been trained as soldiers to fight for our small crowded Isles.
Most of us alive now did not see planes fly over our homes filled with high explosives trying to obliterate us. We don’t have any idea what it is like to queue for hours for a tiny scrap of meat to feed our whole family with.
Our major political crisis this week concerns how banks trade with each other. Not armaments to defend us, not the possibility we might be plunged into a war, but fraud, which merely harms wallets.
Western Europe has found for itself a situation of “Splendid Isolation,” where we only fight distant wars we barely notice. As I sit and type this in Syria there will be women begging God to spare their sons from dying not in some foreign land, but on their doorstep, in their schoolroom. In Mali perhaps it is the turn of an Imam to stand boldly before the face of violence and say something close to the words of the clergyman in “Went the Day Well”: “I am a minister of the Christian faith. I will take no orders from those who are the enemies & oppressors of mankind”.
War has not stopped; even now there are British homes with a picture of a young warrior draped in black, not a faded photograph by an old woman’s bed, but beside the bright face of a young bride. 70 years ago we would remember it every day, and thank God both for those willing to die for our freedom, and for the fact we had been spared for another day.
However for millions even now war is not something distant. “To Timbuktu” is used to mean the very end of the earth, yet it is in truth closer to us than some countries that speak our language. If we do ever find ourselves in a war zone we know we are to wait for the consulate or Embassy to rescue us, rather than help.
If however, we are to end the existence of the horror of war for all people we need to face up to the fact that it exists, and that it falls on everybody to fight it.
One need only look at the figures that emerge from countries recovering from the horror of war to realise that the selflessness that we idolise is a human quality. The stiff upper lip, BBC English and cricket may be rather less global, but the truth is universal, people will endure war. If they are to thrive however, they will need peace. Then we can read about a Libor scandal in the Levant, or traffic jams in Timbuktu.
Over The Teapots 