It must have been about half past eight last Saturday morning (30.12.06), as I was finishing breakfast and readying myself to leave home on my way to a funeral in Bristol, that my eighteen year old daughter, checking her e-mails via Yahoo, announced that Saddam Hussein had been executed twenty nine minutes earlier. Hanged.
An unpleasant, unwelcome shock that was no shock, left me chewing on lead pellets, under heavy clouds, and breathing air from which most of the oxygen had been removed.
The funeral I was heading for, was that of a dear friend of thirty years, Sheila, who, at the age of 86, had slipped away on Christmas Eve.
Thirty years is fifty percent of my life . . . the thoughts that emerge to give order to big events.
Sheila, born in 1920, I met on a psychotherapy training course – it’s what the seventies were about – straddled the generations; actually part of my parents’ generation but she felt part of my (our) generation. At the same time her memories gave access to that longer life, the thirties, the war years, connections to the Bloomsbury group, years of analysis, family histories. Stuff that fuelled our conversations through our regular meetings over fifteen years, then more occasionally after she moved to Scotland in the nineties.
Opposition, resistance, civilised values . . . trying to see, trying to make sense of, making a stand. The Bloomsbury group forging one of those paradigmatic shifts. The Upper Class world of hunting, shooting and flogging challenged by the Arts.
And there’s my five year old self looking out at the world, a world that had just emerged from the cataclysmic events of a second world war, looking out at the world and finding the question of what’s right and what’s wrong. When did my pride at not only being on the winning side develop, but being on the ‘right’ side; the side that embraced civilised values. And what do we call the ‘other’ side? Barbaric, mad, inhuman? An eruption of all the devils in Hell.
In a word, Iraq. Iraq, that’s been turned from one sort of hell into another sort of hell.
And it’s more complicated. There’s history, there’s who did what to whom, there’s the big boys in the playground and us little lads try to keep out of their way if we know what’s good for us, but maybe one of these days we’ll be big too.
In the Memorial Woodland Burial Site, a few miles north of Bristol, I was glad to be part of a very moving service that remembered and celebrated Sheila. At the end of which we assembled behind the hearse to walk in the pouring rain, through the growing woodland, to the open grave, readied to receive Sheila’s body.
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