Just a thought
A fascinating aspect of what, for want of a better terms I shall call ‘major crises’ (whether they be over something cooked for an important dinner party at home that goes wrong, your local football team losing four games on the bounce, right through to national political impasses or even US Presidential elections) is how they are perceived at different times.
Take the current UK horlicks over Brexit. When David Cameron and his advisers made their catastrophic calculation that promising a Referendum on EU membership was a risk worth taking, they could not possibly have imagined in their wildest nightmares that the outcome would be a vote in favour of Leave.
Or at least one almost hopes that they couldn’t, because – if that’s not the case – the only two conclusions any sane person could reach is that they were criminally negligent or irredeemably stupid, and quite possibly both.
Right now, of course, we’re all sitting at our breakfast tables every morning wondering – fuelled by the previous 24 hours’ worth of blanket coverage in the media and all the speculation of the pundits and politicians – just how much more complicated and convoluted it can become and indeed, ultimately, how on earth it is all going to be resolved.
And probably fearing that (this time) there really is no way at all out of the mess.
Let me comfort all Rusters by assuring them not only that, one fine day, all this will be over, but that in perhaps only a decade from now historians will be looking back and finding all sorts of contemporary ‘facts’ to which none of us are currently privy and then coming up with narratives and theories that just aren’t occurring to any of us currently involved and living through it all on a day by day basis.
How can I possibly say that?
Well, consider wartime experiences – something of an extreme situation for any human being.
Our modern perception of life in the WW1 trenches is that it was endlessly awful – spent being wet, cold, knee-deep in mud, starving, either on sentry duty or cowering in dugouts, fighting off trench-foot, lice and rats the size of cats, constantly under fire and at risk of death or being maimed (average life of a Brit subaltern being 6 weeks, and so on) – and, of course, this reinforces and underpins our over-powering sense of sadness and futility whenever we consider the sheer scale of the casualty numbers.
However, it wasn’t quite like that. Over the course of the 1914-1918 War the average British Tommie spent only 47% of his time anywhere near the trenches – the rest he spent somewhere behind the lines – training, resting, having time off, socialising in the local towns, or even very occasionally going home on leave and/or recuperating from wounds and/or diseases.
It is estimated that, compared to the ordinary Brit soldier’s average (one in eight) death rate during WW1, the rate among Brit officers was one in seven and of Oxbridge-educated officers as high as one in five. But think about it – even the last figure means that 80% of Oxbridge-educated officers actually survived the War.
And then fast-forward to WW2. On the Home Front, it wasn’t all a case of the population being in a state of semi-starvation, their nights spent uncomfortably huddled together in their hordes on the Underground station platforms and their daylight hours above ground at the ever-present risk of at any moment being bombed to oblivion.
For example, some member of what to me was the older generation used to tell of the fantastic atmosphere of ‘Blitz mentality’ that held sway, making the period exciting, energising and even fun – with supposed danger all around, the dance halls were always full and the partying generally as wild as anything that happens today. Young kids going outside to play used to to watch the Battle of Britain dog-fights taking place above them in the sky over the Kent countryside. In many respects, for those who lived through it, WW2 on the Home Front was one of the highlight periods of their existence.
That’s the point of my sermon for today.
However strange and horrendous things may currently seem over the current Brexit constitutional and political crisis – and indeed the prospect of either a US President Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump being elected next week – we should all try to remind ourselves that one day all this will be over.
Next summer, as usual, we will still be watching games of village cricket in bright sunshine from our pitch-side deck chairs, sipping Pimm’s or warm bitter, smoking our pipes, munching on cucumber or jam sandwiches and cake … and once more recalling with our pals the halcyon days of June 1963 when in the Lords Test Match ‘Lord’ Ted Dexter whacked a magnificent 75-ball 70 off the bowling of the fearsome West Indies fast bowlers Wes Hall and Charlie Griffiths.
At least, I know I will.
