Real Remembrance

As I understand it, the red poppy signifies the blood shed in fields by young men in a war which was unnecessary and should never have happened. It was never about supporting our troops to go out and shed more blood, either their own or that of others, but this seems to be how the meaning of the red poppy badge has evolved: a political statement instead of a remembrance of the tragic and ugly realities of war.

So how about we don’t wear a red poppy this time but instead light a candle in the privacy of our own homes and think about all those young lives that were lost in these wars (and others not mentioned on the Imperial War Museum site from where the following information comes):

First World War, 1914–1918
Russian Civil War, 1917–1922
Irish War of Independence, 1919–1921
Irish Civil War, 1922–1923
Second World War, 1939–1945
Korean War, 1950–1953
Kenya Emergency, 1952–1960
Suez Crisis, 1956
Malayan Emergency, 1948–1960
Aden Emergency, 1963–1967
The Troubles, 1968–1998
Falklands War, 1982
Gulf War, 1990–1991
Bosnian War, 1992–1995
Kosovo War, 1998–1999
Global War on Terrorism, 2001–2013
War in Afghanistan, 2001–2014
The Iraq War and Insurgency, 2003–2011

And let’s also remember all the civilians on the ground, millions of them, who died incidentally in the name of preserving other civilians.

Remembrance of the dead is usually a private thing. Perhaps we should keep it that way.

'In what street?'

This is one of the saddest pictures I know of the aftermath of the Clydebank Blitz. I've put it here because Wednesday and Thursday of this week, the 13th and 14th March, will be the 72nd anniversary of the devastating bombing of Clydebank, the Clydebank Blitz. To mark this I’d like to talk about the numbers because since last year’s anniversary I have discovered the source of those figures and the date. I was appalled, I have to admit, but subsequently greatly and sadly mystified.

The bombing shook Clydebank on a Thursday and a Friday. On the Sunday the authorities reported 528 dead, stating that there was ‘probably a further 200’. Another 617 were said to have been seriously injured. This report was not made public at the time but these numbers were published the following year by the Sunday Post and the Sunday Mail. This was of course illegal because of war-time censorship and I believe the two papers got their knuckles rapped for their trouble.

The people of Clydebank are said to have been appalled by these numbers too. An ARP warden, who had been part of the rescue operation, is noted to have remarked on hearing the figures, ‘In what street?’ Eye-witness accounts confirm a far higher scale of damage and the sheer ratio of bombs and bombers to houses and people suggests the numbers were far higher: over 4,000 bombs for 12,000 dwellings. This is one bomb for every three houses. There were somewhere between 55,000 and 60,000 people living there, the population having swelled by 10 to 15 thousand because of the availability of war work.

But they don’t know.

And in a way that’s the point. Everybody scarpered after the first night, those who could, those who weren’t part of the rescue operation. And they took some time to come back, those that did. Nobody was there to point out they hadn’t seen Johnnie for a few days, or the guy who’d newly arrived from the other end for the country for work whose name nobody knew. And some areas were just too thoroughly burnt out and flattened.

It’s an ugly competition but Clydebank took more bombs in two nights that poor Coventry had in the entire war. Numbers do actually mean something, and therefore numbers need to be accurate. In some way they validate the experience by confirming that yes, it was that bad, and yes, the chances of escape from certain areas were extremely slim. This is standard post-trauma healing, trying to put together a picture of what happened so you can understand it, deal with it and keep living.

So they don’t know the real numbers. And this is what mystifies me: why put out figures at all and why defend them? Why not just say, especially so long after it all happened, awful though it is, “We just don’t know.”

The chapters in Mavis’s Shoe which cover the actual bombing and the day in between, were derived in part from accounts written by people who had actually lived through this terrifying experience. They also reflect reportage of other more recent conflicts, notably Bosnia. The Clydebank accounts are to be found in Untold Stories: Remembering Clydebank in War-time, which was published in March 1999 by the Clydebank Life Stories group. I was honoured to be invited to their annual reunion when Mavis’s Shoe was first published to read a small section of the book to the group.

You could have heard a pin drop. I was relieved and delighted when so many people came to speak to me afterwards and tell me more stories of their survival or that of their parents and relatives, and that what I had written was an accurate reflection of those people’s experiences. These are things we do know about.

For more information about the Clydebank Blitz go to this website.
Untold Stories can be found here.
And the best guide to the background so far can be found here.

Labour of Love not Lost

What a delight! Shortly before Mavis’s Shoe was accepted for publication by Waverley Books last October and I was immediately caught in a whirlwind of fast track re-editing and cover blurb, I was cooking up the latest draft of another novel. This work-in-progress was variously filed as ‘Hopping the Twig’, ‘Strange Fish’, ‘Essentials’, ‘Elementals’, ‘Stranger Fish’ (a later version) and ‘This Book Smells’, (its first title - a warning seemed in order). It was simmering on the back burner while I ignored it and tried to get some distance. The exact distance I took was from Glasgow to the south of France via the airwaves plus the 400 kilometres on my beloved old bike along the Canals de Garonne and du Midi. This took me from the Garonne in Bordeaux to Port La Nouvelle on the Mediterranean, effectively linking the Atlantic and Mediterranean seas. Being flat, it wasn’t difficult and took less time than you’d expect, despite a couple of days of head winds and one of heavy rain; nine days in all plus a couple spent with family and then the journey home. I have to admit to some smugness about this at the time, although it’s greatly tempered now by limited exercise since those heady days.

Anyway, in total only two weeks had passed, not enough for any mental distance to have worked its magic. Due to the furore over Mavis’s Shoe it is only recently that I have returned properly to this multiply-named novel. Today I reached the end of my read-through with a tear in my eye. The obvious reason for weepiness is that this book is partly about death and what counsellors (which I used to be one of) call ‘complicated grief’. The tear was eyestrain too, but the main cause was writer’s terror. It is always worrying going back to a piece of work that has been left. There is the fear that you were deluded when you wrote it and that it’s actually not worth the computer chip it was written on and you’ve wasted a year of your life, or more if you’re Garbriel Garcia Marquez or Donna Leon to name but a couple who allegedly take a decade. The tear is for fear unfounded, a sigh of relief, that despite the still considerable editing task ahead, all is not lost and the thing was worth doing whether it is ever published or not. Unfounded fear is a great delight, a variation on ‘Better to have loved and lost’ etc. Only a seriously worried person can experience that kind of relief.

I saw a documentary recently about Peter Howson, the Glasgow artist famous for being brave enough to go to Bosnia as a war artist and being so seriously disturbed by what he saw there that his life fell to tatters on his return. Whatever you think of the whole strange idea of a ‘war artist’ or of Howson’s dark portrayals of disturbing events, he is astonishingly prolific. Apart from a certain commission which seemed to stop him in his tracks for a quite a period, I wonder if any of his paintings ever took a year, and doubt it. And although paintings can take some artists even longer to complete, I doubt there are any novelists who finish a book in a couple of weeks or a day, and if they do, whether it is their best work.

I’m not as brave as Howson and have never been in a war zone, apart from once wandering with a friend through Armagh (I think) in the dead of night and suddenly being surrounded by soldiers with big guns and being asked what the hell we thought we were doing. ‘Hitching,’ I said, wide-eyed and very young, and they escorted us to the edge of town where we erected a tent beside the border post.

But Howson and I share a common subject in war and its effects on ordinary people. Howson, as an artist, takes snapshots which don’t tell stories but suggests them, in the way a poet might provoke an image in a reader’s mind. The beauty of novels is their very length. There may be ugly brutal scenes but a good book will throw them into contrast with hope or generosity or humour then throw you back into despair and on further to disgust or love. You stay with it for hours at a time being moved through all the different experiences a human can have. Quite a bargain really for as little as £7.99 a pop.