I've been thinking a lot about the extraordinary moments recently.
Yesterday I was helping my friend D look for pics to use on her invitation for her 40th birthday party that's coming up soon. She grew up in Yorkshire and her family were, until the closure of the mines, miners. We were talking about the huge impact that the miners' strike had on the lives of her family. Browsing through Flickr we found this brilliant set of images by Swedish photographer Bjorn Rantil showing the back to work march by miners and their families in her village of Armthorpe - a march that she went on. We were completely gobsmacked to find the image that's I've reproduced here - the bloke second from the right is her uncle, who sadly died last year.
For a moment it was like she was right back there, in the thick of that passionate struggle. "It was like there was a war on," she said. "Our village was the frontline. Police on horseback and in riot gear everywhere. Blockades and pitched battles, people hiding in our attic. It was a war."
I've been glued to the various documentaries about the Battle of Britain that have been broadcasting recently and been finding those stories absolutely fascinating.
From my perspective, those events must have been some of the most extraordinary of my grandparents' lives. My dad's dad was always reticent to talk to me about the war. He told me not very long before he died that he resented the swallowing up of 6 years of his prime years. "Six years of me life that I'll never get back!" he told me in his heavy Brummie accent. But he also told me about reaching liberated France post D-Day (he was in logistics - his job was to get vehicles to where they needed to be and make sure that they got fixed quickly when they broke down) and his commanding officer deciding that they deserved a small drink in celebration of what had been achieved. He told me: "We went into the chateau where we were planning to spend the evening and had a look in the wine cellar. The only thing that was left in there that hadn't got smashed up or damaged was a crate of champagne. So that's what we drank. It was the first time I ever drank champagne, and the last time until today. I didn't half have a headache the next day." He was sitting sipping champagne on my wedding day when he told me this story - claiming that this was only the second occasion that he'd drunk it, and the first time since that original taste in France in 1945. Amazing! I will never know whether he was telling me the truth.
My step-mother's father was one of the elite Jamaican airmen who came and served in Britain in the RAF during the war. The selection process was rigorous, and he would have had to really shine to be selected. And then to come to a freezing England to serve in a society where racism was the norm. It must have been quite an experience.
Meanwhile my mum's dad experienced a broken heart (my gran temporarily dumped him for an American GI) and a broken back (during RAF training) in the war. Both experiences that he often spoke about to me when I was a little girl.
Despite my Brummie grandad's dour assessment of his contribution, I can't help feeling amazed and proud when I think about what the people from that generation did. The sacrifices they made and the way they lived their lives on a knife edge in so many ways. I can't even begin to imagine it.
It feels to me that, miners' strike aside, my generation has its extraordinary times still to come. Sometimes it feels like we're asleep. We think that the world is being changed by our iPhones and our iPads. But I'm still looking for the evidence. The internet and the communications revolution we're experiencing will be so much pointless distraction if all it leads to is an ability to share stupid video clips on Facebook or access and app from Jamie Oliver.
What's the point of being able to talk to anyone in the world and share ideas across borders and cultural boundaries if all we do is recommend more pointless shit to each other and get excited about how we can buy yet more STUFF from the palms of our hands?
When our brave new world of communication connects ideas and actions in a way that changes things for the better - shared wealth; a shift to a way of life where we are living within our resources not wasting them; an end to the crazy financial system that requires endless, exponential growth to function; peaceful conclusions of ideological wars . . . *that's* when it will really be extraordinary. Until then, it's just another great big shop window.
My dad said to me recently that when talking to a person at an organisation in Birmingham (I won't go into details to protect the innocent!) that he was struck by the way organisations that used to have a genuine ideology, based on a vision of equality, are now just operating in a vaccuum. No foundation of ideas about what is right and wrong. Just expediency.
My next personal extraordinary step is going to be to find a way to stop being a shop assistant. Time to focus on the things that have genuine meaning, honour and integrity.
2 comments:
What an interesting piece of history from all your families. Totally agree on our generation. Way too smooth..... We have no idea what it means to stand for something. And are we happier for it? No.
Interesting that since you wrote this post, outcomes of protests in north Africa and Middle East have been attributed to use of Twitter, FB etc. Thus proving that - in other places - people can and do use these forms of communication to instigate change in society. Just ain't happening here (in the west) anytime soon :-(
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