"Remembrance Day is complicated..."

This week Jane Traies gives us her thoughts on Remembrance Day. In the UK ceremonies are held on the Sunday nearest to Armistice Day (11th November) - that's today.  

REMEMBRANCE DAY

This Sunday the royal family, accompanied by representatives of Her Majesty’s government and the armed forces, will gather in Westminster as they do every year for the National Service of Remembrance. It won’t be quite the same this year, because we are in the middle of a pandemic and a national lockdown. So the ceremony has been adapted for social distancing, and the traditional march-past will not take place. But there will still be a two-minute silence at 11 o’clock, followed by wreath-laying at the foot of the Cenotaph by the Great and Good. 

Every year I try not to watch this service at the Cenotaph, because I know it will make me cross and depressed. Yet, every year, as it gets to about 10.55 a.m., I put the television on in spite of myself, and watch as institutional privilege, militarism, class inequality, the self-righteousness of politicians and the obedient sentimentality of the British people are solemnly paraded yet again. The commentator (and yes, it is still a Dimbleby) speaks in the same tone of hushed reverence that we heard at the Coronation nearly seventy years ago. And I am furious and disgusted, because nothing has changed, soldiers and civilians are still dying as we speak, and the ceremony seems to start from the premise that all of that is noble and acceptable and inevitable. But it’s not. It’s just the ‘old lie, dulce et decorum est.’

My great-uncle George was still a teenager when he was wounded at the Battle of the Somme. We were never quite sure how long he lay in a shell-hole before he was found. When I first knew him, he was a middle-aged man with what was then called ‘nerves.’
In 1943, my father landed on a beach in Italy and stepped on a mine that blew his foot off. His leg was amputated; he was twenty-two. In those days there was nothing heroic about disability. He walked with pain for the rest of his life.
My Auntie Joy, a twenty-one-year-old Army nurse, was part of the first medical team to go into the concentration camp at Belsen after it was liberated in 1945. She woke screaming from nightmares for the next ten years. She stopped believing in God. For the rest of her life, she found it easier to love animals than human beings.

There’s nothing dulce or decorum about any of that.

So, for people of my generation and older, Remembrance Day is complicated. The first time I heard the Last Post break the two minutes’ silence, I wasn’t yet old enough to go to school; but, even at that age, I absorbed the solemnity and the pride of it from my parents, for whom the struggles and losses of the Second World War were still recent and painful. Growing up in the 40s and 50s, I was taught – at home, at church and at school – the twin doctrines of noble sacrifice and national gratitude. ‘I vow to thee, my Country…’ Those weren’t abstract things for us, because they were about real people: the distant cousins in uniform in Gran’s photo album; our dad’s Old Comrades, whose names on the regimental war memorial we heard read out every November; and all those friends and relations who carried the visible and invisible scars of two World Wars. As late as the 1960s, when I started driving, I remember stopping the car at the side of the road for the two minutes of the Armistice Day silence, as drivers did in those days, and feeling that I was part of something serious and proper. Strange, now, to think of it; but that’s how it was. Doubt would have been disloyal. 

So, what do I do now, awkward old pacifist-atheist-republican queer that I became? That’s not straightforward, either. 

I don’t wear a poppy these days (or if I do, it’s a white one); but I still put money in the box, in memory of Dad and Uncle Georgie and Auntie Joy. I wouldn’t dream of joining my neighbours as they process to the village war memorial behind a marching band; but I do put down my gardening gloves and go and stand on the pavement to watch them. It makes me feel grumpy and conflicted, but the sight of the old men in their medals still moves me as deeply as it ever did. Then I go indoors and, after my little ritual struggle, I put the television on and ‘Nimrod’ still makes me cry. 

So why do I still watch that pompous ceremony? Why, every single year, as they settle to the two minutes’ silence, does a lump form in my throat and make my eyes sting? It’s partly a Pavlovian reaction, of course; but it’s a bit more complicated than that.