Archie’s Day

Posted on 6th June 2021 by Ian

Seventy-seven years ago, my friend Archie set foot on a beach in northern France.

Archie was 21 years old at the time. He was from Newtownards in Co Down, the town where I knew him in my days as a curate. Archie had volunteered to join the Royal Air Force three years previously, in 1941, when he was 18. There was no conscription in Northern Ireland, Archie chose to join up.

Archie trained as a radio operator, imagining that this would lead him to becoming the member of a bomber crew. However, the Canadian army were short of radio operators and Archie was transferred to serve with the First Canadian Army. Thus it was on 6th June 1944 that he found himself leaping into the water from an allied landing craft with a radio pack on his back and running onto the beach at Saint Aubin sur Mer. The beach had the code name “Juno.”

Archie avoided commemorations, he took the view that they didn’t capture the horror of the events. Archie never attended Remembrance Sunday parades where priests and politicians uttered inanities and returned to their comfortable lives. He believed that many of those who spoke would not have been at the parades if they had seen the things he had seen.

When books were published to mark the 60th anniversary of D-Day in 2004, there seemed to be many veterans who shared Archie’s opinion. Martin Bowman collected a series of reminiscences in his book Remembering D-Day: Personal Histories of Everyday Heroes. Bowman quoted from Donald Burgett, a member of the 101st Airborne Division who was nineteen years old when he landed in Normandy. Burgett said,

It was dirty and dehumanising and disgusting . . . I just hope that when they make their fine speeches on the beachheads they remember what happened. I do. Every night of the year. The images of the dead always wake me up.

Archie never talked about the fighting, he never talked about the advance across Europe. Archie’s stories were about trivia, about how .303 rifles were useless for shooting rabbits, as the bullet went straight through and the rabbit ran on. Or his stories were about sadness, like the moment of finding three soldiers dead after a V2 rocket site had been captured and the three men had drunk alcoholic rocket fuel and died from poisoning. The horrors, he saved to himself.

I remember Archie this day every year. We walked many miles of the roads of Ulster together. He was a true hero.

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Closing church doors

Posted on 5th June 2021 by Ian

The church door was locked. Church doors seem locked most of the time now. Perhaps it is some restriction related to the virus, or perhaps the person who once opened and closed the church each day has had, through age or ill health, to give up their faithful duty.

In Ireland, I had a churchwarden who was said to pass down the lane which ended at his house at 9.20 am, an hour and forty minutes before the 11 o’clock service. After turning out of the lane, the journey to the church would have taken him around ten minutes, allowing him to arrive by 9.30. The early arrival was considered a piece of gentle eccentricity among other worshippers; what preparation for the morning service could there be that could take an hour and a half, a period of time twice that of the morning service, which generally lasted forty-five minutes? No-one would question him, though, the church building was an important part of his life; its internal and external well-being were treated with an importance that was equivalent to that with which he would treat his own personal health.

Here in England, the diligent care of a country church would be regarded as anachronistic by the evangelical leaders who now hold sway in the church. Voices from the urban centres would talk of the need to close such buildings, of how many more resources there would be for “mission” (generally employing people like themselves), if money was not spent on the upkeep of such places, of how much better everything would be if everyone gathered in a single church (under their style of leadership). Perhaps they are right, though empirical evidence shows that when such paths are pursued, many of those whose families have attended the church for generations simply disappear. They want nothing of the electric guitars, drums and media projectors.

However, there is a much deeper value in such rural places that is missed by those who perceive them as buildings to be measured in terms of fabric and funds. To men like that churchwarden, heading to church 9.20 am, the church to which he devoted so many hours was a place of holiness.

The places seen as a burden by the church strategists and administrators are places of holiness to people in the communities in which they stand. Even if people never attend, it matters to many of them that the building is there. If the Church of England is going to insist on being the established church, it must take seriously that duty to be present.

 

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Climbing gates

Posted on 4th June 2021 by Ian

The grass in the meadow beside the house has grown thick and tall in the moisture and warmth of the past two weeks. There will be a good cut of silage. The five bar gate to the field stood closed, despite the lack of livestock meaning it was not required.

Once that gate would have been climbed by the schoolboy from the house next door, once it would have been vaulted by boys from other houses on the road.

It is some years since I climbed a gate. I had gone to look for a man whose whereabouts were uncertain, it had seemed important to call at the house.

The potholes in the lane had been filled with fresh stones, or at least it seemed they had, perhaps it was just the summer dryness that had created an under wheel firmness. The long six bar galvanised gate was padlocked, very firmly. Near his front door, a line of clothes blew in the June breeze. If there was washing on the line, he must be well and he could not be far away. His car was not to be seen, but that was not conclusive evidence he was not around.

The padlock presented no barrier to entry, climbing the gate was a simple matter. I remembered those companions in youthful times who would have vaulted it. Only in reaching the top of the gate did the thought occur that the entrance was on falling ground; that the padlock end of the long gate was significantly further from the tarmac than the hinge end. No matter. Bringing the left leg over the top, I leaped to the ground, landing flat-footed on the floor with the elegance of a potato sack. The effect of the jump was strange – there was a feeling of having been punched in the nose.

The man was not to be found and the second scaling of the gate was at the upper end, with a climb down the other side; no more jumping.

The hedgerows assumed a mocking tone as I passed them along the road on the journey from the man’s yard; great purple foxgloves and white cow parsley dominating the long grass of the verges. In the fields, the buttercups, the commonplace colour of childhood years, had blanketed the country around, their full, deep yellow offset by the deep greens around them. The flowers seemed to say, “you have grown older, we have never changed.” The day will come when the thought of gate climbing will have ceased and yet the colours will still remain.

One reaches an age of accepting that things are not what they once were.

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Our forgotten dead

Posted on 3rd June 2021 by Ian

A tree grows up out of a grave at Saint Andrew’s Church in High Ham. The name of the deceased, whose mortal remains lay beneath the tree, is indecipherable, not that legibility would add much to knowledge of them. The corner of the churchyard dotted with Victorian memorials is unkept, the graves have been unattended for generations.

It is more than fifty years since my family moved into the last of the line of council houses on Windmill Road, my mother’s family have lived within a few miles of here for at least four hundred years, memories are long and yet the names of the Victorian dead are names I have not heard spoken. Perhaps the families died out, perhaps they moved away, but they seem as forgotten as the stones to their eternal memory.

Forgetfulness seems characteristic of my people.

The tree growing from the grave recalled the line from Seamus Heaney’s poem Requiem for the Croppies. Writing of the Battle of Vinegar Hill in Co Wexford in 1798, a battle in which pikemen faced muskets and cannon, Heaney concludes his verse with the line, “And, in August, wheat grew up out of the grave.”

Not remembering those lying beneath the turf of the churchyard, we seem also to forget those who died facing guns with pitchforks. In 1685, it would have been possible to have walked from the churchyard and stood at Turn Hill and watched the one-sided conflict that was the Battle of Sedgemoor. There would have been stories of death and loss, and grim tales of the violent retribution inflicted upon local communities by Judge Jeffreys Bloody Assizes.

In some places, there are plaques on walls recording the fact that rebels from that town or village had been hung, but there is no sense of a wider ownership of such a history.

Perhaps, in recent times, there have been no poets in the English language whose work is comparable with that of Heaney, but those poets there are do not use themes of battle and death in a way that is possible in Ireland. There is no major piece of literary work that re-presents the Monmouth Rebellion in 1685 as a popular movement that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of peasant farmers. There is no re-presenting the story of the rebels in a way that makes it a symbolic moment, that imbues the story with a deeper meaning.

Lying unremembered in Somerset soil has a long tradition.

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No sultry silences

Posted on 2nd June 2021 by Ian

A thundery, sultry afternoon, more akin to late August than early June. On such afternoons in childhood days the Somerset landscape would be blanketed in silence.

Such occasional sound as there was had to struggle to break through the heavy air that threatened globular raindrops and claps of thunder.  The occasional sounds were very occasional; a tractor heading for fields, cows anticipating the evening milking, the odd car heading homeward in the late afternoon.

Between the interruptions, the silence was profound.  There was time to hear bees and crickets and distant birdsong, breaths of breezes so light that leaves showed only the slightest rustle.  Inside the house, cut off from the natural noise, the silence was complete.

Such silences seem now to be elusive, even in rural areas.  Tractors and farm machinery are powerfully-engined and register their presence; villages are populated by those who commute to their daily work, depending upon cars for transport; the demands of 21st Century lifestyles necessitate electricity supplies that hums through cables and transformers.

People surround themselves with sound; pass open windows and the voices of radio and daytime television fill the air. Silence has become terrifying to people, the ubiquitous electronic devices testifying to an urge to be enclosed in noise, to banish any prospect of quietness. The constant tones of mobile phones, the arrival of messages and the answering of calls, excluding any danger of isolation.

Possibilities of silence are becoming rare.  Even churches, once places where there might have been a chance of silent reflection, seem to feel a compulsion to fill ancient space with technology and volume, crowding out any space there might have been for introspection.

There seems almost a fear of noiselessness.  Public spaces are filled with muzak. Even doctor’s waiting rooms, places where an absence of noise would seem desirable, seem to be considered incomplete without digital music or radio programmes.

Are we afraid of something, afraid that if there is silence we shall find ourselves lost, unable to cope with there being nothing except our own thoughts? What has happened to our capacity to be quiet, to reflect, to think?

Losing the chance of silence, moments when there is nothing to do other than face ourselves, there is more than just the loss of quietness, there is the loss of something of our inner self, the loss of something of our personal independence.

Without quietness, life is not what it might be.

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