Week 1.10

Tendring Topics……..on line

The First Decade of the Third Millennium

There were people, very knowledgeable people, who assured us that in celebrating the beginning of the third millennium on 1st January 2,000, we were doing so prematurely. Unless there was a year 0 between 1 B.C. and 1 A.D. (sorry, I can’t be bothered with this ‘Common Era’ business!) the new century and millennium wouldn’t begin until 1st January 2,001. The same people would tell us that the first decade of the 21st Century wouldn’t end until 31st December 2010.

They would, strictly speaking, be correct. However this is one of those occasions on which boring old facts are of less importance than public perception. It was the change in the date from 1999 to 2,000 that was seen by most people as the beginning of the new millennium and it is the change in the date from 2009 to 2010 that is seen as the end of its first decade. One thing about the next decade is certain; ‘Twenty-ten’ rolls off the tongue rather more euphoniously than ‘Twenty-o-nine’!

What a decade that first one has been! It has seen ten years of New Labour government that must have had the founders of the Labour Movement turning in their graves. Who would have thought that during a decade of ‘Labour’ government we would have seen continuing privatisation; the continued sale at bargain basement prices of homes bequeathed by former far-seeing councils to eradicate overcrowding and homelessness; a parliament with many of its members unmasked as extravagant, self-serving cheats; the gap between Britain’s richest and poorest wider than ever in living memory; and Britain engaged in two ‘colonial wars’ one of which was illegal and the other unwinnable? Finally came the collapse of a financial system motivated by greed, for which the best remedy advanced by our political leaders (and their opponents) has been handing over billions of pounds of our money to the Banks, the avarice and incompetence of whose top management had triggered the crisis.

Ramsey Macdonald is said to have failed as a Labour leader as a result of being ‘dazzled by duchesses’. The current and recent Labour leadership appears to have been blinded by billionaires.

I wish that I could say something cheerful and positive about the decade that we are entering. Some lines from G. K. Chesterton’s ‘Ballad of the White Horse’ come to my mind.

I tell you naught for your comfort.
Yea, naught for your desire.
Save that the night grows darker yet,
And the waves rise higher.

Nature made its contribution!

The final line of the verse quoted above reminds me that ‘the noughties’, as people are beginning to call that first third-millennial decade, was a period of natural as well as political, economic and foreign policy disasters. Standing out above all others was, of course, the tsunami of Boxing Day 2004, which cost over two-hundred-thousand lives, including those of many Britons and other north Europeans who had been seeking the Southeast Asian sun during their Christmas break.

Though the world’s worst natural disaster during the decade, the tsunami was by no means the only one. There were appalling earthquakes. The one nearest home was in southern Italy where a whole village was totally destroyed. Then there were devastating bush fires in Australia, California and southern Europe, and almost equally devastating floods, avalanches and mudslides elsewhere. Britain, most recently in the Lake District, has had its share of floods, though the threat here has been more to property and the infrastructure than to human life.

Frozen Sea at Clacton. January 1963

Earthquakes and tsunamis are beyond human control. The most that we can ever hope to do is to predict their occurrence and evacuate the threatened populations. Most bush fires though are a consequence either of human carelessness, human malevolence or human irresponsibility. Floods are made worse by building over, and concreting over, land into which rainwater would otherwise be absorbed. And both bush fires and floods result from the extreme weather conditions produced by the global warming that the recent Copenhagen summit tried and failed to address effectively

As usual, our corner of Southern East Anglia has been spared the worst of these extreme weather conditions. We have had no serious inundations from the sea since the tidal surges of 1953. We have had, by our standards, very heavy rain recently – but nothing compared with that in the Lake District and the West Country.

Wellesley Road, Clacton. New Year's Day 1979

We are experiencing bitterly cold weather as I write – but we have had worse in the past (see photos!), and today it is even worse elsewhere, both in Britain and throughout mainland western Europe.

Perhaps that is why we seem to have a more than average number of climate change sceptics (including our MP, Mr Douglas Carswell) in the area. So far, the most serious effects of global warming have been to ‘other people living elsewhere’. I sincerely hope that circumstances never put those of us who do take climatic change seriously in a position to say, ‘We did tell you so!’

………and my own experience.

That first decade of the new millennium was catastrophic for me personally too. In fact for over two years I was so absorbed in my own concerns that I didn’t consciously read a newspaper or watch a tv news or current affairs programme. I was in a world of my own, a world that was to be shattered, and I was completely oblivious of whatever triumphs and disasters might be going on all round me.

On 27th April 2006 my wife Heather and I celebrated our 60th wedding anniversary. It was Hitler who had brought us together in 1939! She was then a schoolgirl, a fifteen-year-old evacuee from Greater London. I was an eighteen-year-old soldier, newly called up with the Territorial Army. We kept in touch throughout the war and were married on 27th April 1946, just four days after my discharge from the Army.

Our Diamond Wedding celebration was a somewhat muted one. Almost two years earlier, in July 2004 Heather, who had suffered from osteoporosis for some time, had fallen and broken her hip. She went into hospital and had the hip repaired, but was never again able to walk independently, and she became increasingly disabled as the months passed. I was her sole carer, determined to carry out her wish to remain in her own home for as long as she lived.

The celebration, like the one for our 25th, 40th and 50th anniversaries, was held in Clacton Quaker Meeting House where Heather and I had worshipped on Sundays for half a century. A short, half-hour or thereabouts, Meeting for Worship and Thanksgiving, was followed by a friendly chat accompanied by refreshments provided by Clacton Quakers. All members of our extended family had been invited to attend and all (except grandson Chris in Taiwan!) had managed to get there. There were also members of Clacton Quaker Meeting and other friends of ours. It was a bittersweet occasion for me because, in my heart, I knew that Heather would be seeing some of those friends and relatives for the last time


Diamond Wedding Celebration – sons, daughters-in-law, grandchildren, nephews and nieces, great-nephews and great-nieces and, of course, Heather and myself. It proved to be the last photograph ever taken of Heather.

Sadly, my forebodings were realized. Heather’s life came to an end, at home, in her sleep and in her own bed, on 12th July.

Since my retirement from local government service in 1980 I had been working from home as a freelance writer and we had grown even closer together than we had ever been. For two years she had been the sole purpose of my existence. Her death left a gaping gap in my life, the extent of which I took several months to appreciate fully. We had been separated before. After we first met I was four years overseas with the army. She had had several spells in hospital, including two years in a TB Sanatorium just two years after we were married. It took time for me to realize that this time there would be no happy ending. Never again would she be waiting for me when I came home. Never again would I see her sweet smile or hear her happy laughter. Despite her intermittent ill-health Heather had been essentially a very happy person. After her death a former member of the Quaker Sunday School Class that she once ran, wrote to tell me that she always associated Heather ‘with fun and laughter’.

I desperately tried to fill that gap with busyness. My family helped magnificently. Andy, my younger son and his wife visited me, and still visit me, regularly and are constantly in touch. They have twice driven me up to Sheffield to spend time with granddaughter Jo. Chris, my elder grandson arranged for me to have a Flickr site on the internet, www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea on which I have posted some 400 photographs, while Nick, his brother, arranged first the blogspot www.ernesthall.blogspot.com and then the web site www.ernesthall.net on which I post these blogs.

Elder son Pete and daughter-in-law Arlene, together with Ni ck, have encouraged, and made it possible for me to visit Zittau the small town in Germany where I have found new interests and new good friends. They have also on several occasions taken me to Brussels, where Nick works and lives.

They, together with Heather’s nephew and nieces and their families, and with good friends in England and now in Germany too, have helped me to find a new purpose in life when it would have been all too easy to slide into a pit of loneliness and depression. Life has become worth living again, though Heather is never out of my mind. Over and over again, after I have finished a piece of writing with which I have felt particularly pleased, or when I have been travelling abroad, or visiting London, or Sheffield and the Peak District, I have thought ‘If only she were here to share all this with me!’