Week 48 20.11.2011

Tendring Topics.......on line

'All Hope Abandon......'

           As 2011 draws towards its end, the thoughts of old folk like me inevitably go back to Christmases and New Years of the past.  I don’t ever before recall the year’s end being ‘celebrated’ in quite such an atmosphere of gloom and foreboding as it will be this year.

            I suppose that my life was at its very lowest ebb as 1942 came to an end.  I had been a PoW for six months and was in a large PoW camp in northern Italy.  We were cold. We were hungry.  Prolonged hunger showed in our faces, which were gaunt and hollow-cheeked!  Almost every week there was a death from hunger-related causes.  We were louse-infested.  We were dispirited and bored out of our minds. We never lost hope though.  We were all of us sure that Britain and its allies would win the war, and that we would be liberated. By the end of 1943 (though by then transported to a working camp in Germany) – and particularly by the end of 1944, when the thunder of gunfire from the ever-approaching eastern front daily became louder - that hope had become a certainty.  We would soon be home again, and so we were.

            The immediate post-war years are often depicted by historians (how extraordinary that a past that seems so close to me should now be ‘history’!) as a time of privation and hardship with continued shortages and rationing. Many of our towns (and those of most of mainland Europe) were in ruins. We had a housing shortage that makes today’s housing difficulties seem Lilliputian and, having had most of the population engaged in non-productive war activities for the previous six years, we must surely have had a gargantuan national debt.

Heather, the ‘Essex girl’ who had waited for me, and I, never saw it in that light.  To us, the final years of the 1940s were a time of hope and expectancy.  We were proud of the new Labour (not of course New-Labour!) government that we had helped to bring to power and we really believed that we were entering a new age of peace and prosperity shared by all.  How naïve and innocent we were!

We had no worries about the future and were married just days after my discharge from the army in 1946.  Heather’s wedding dress was made by a friend of her mother, and she carried a splendid bouquet of real flowers.  The sports jacket and slacks that I had been given on my discharge from the army didn’t seem quite right for a wedding, so I wore my khaki uniform.  I had had the jacket of my battle dress tailored so that I could wear the top open, with a collar and tie.   A couple of days before the wedding I strode into a posh men’s  outfitters in Ipswich and bought a silk khaki shirt and tie clearly labelled ‘For sale only to officers of HM Forces’.  I was 24 years old and, with seven years army service behind me, I reckoned that I was as good as any officer – and that my bride-to-be was a lot better than any officer’s ‘lady’ I had ever met!

The wedding was at Gant’s Hill Methodist Church, Ilford, and the reception - well attended by both Heather’s and my friends and relatives – was in the church hall.  My best friend, whom I would have liked to have been my best man, was still serving in India.  I asked a former colleague and former fellow POW to do the honours.  I knew that he was a member of the Salvation Army and unlikely to embarrass me at a teetotal wedding reception!  I don’t know how much it all cost but it couldn’t have been very much because neither we, nor our parents had very much to spend.

We were married for sixty years and we faced and survived most of the problems that beset all married couples and one or two (prolonged separation by illness for example) that most avoid.  In all our time together though, I don’t recall a single New Year that we entered without at least a shred of hope of better things to come.

As 2011 comes toward its end I have a warm and comfortable home. I have an income sufficient for my needs.  I have a mobility scooter that prevents my being housebound, loving friends and relatives and, thanks to modern technology, the means of keeping in touch with all of them.

One thing that I lack is hope for the future; Not for my own future (there is unlikely to be very much of that!) but for the future of my sons and grandchildren and, indeed, for our country as a whole.  For the first time ever I don’t feel that there is a reasonable chance that next year will be better for us all than the one coming to an end.  Nor can I see a future has any possible ‘happy ending’.  I don’t think that either our present coalition government or the Labour opposition has a true understanding of, let alone a solution to, our present woes – and I am quite sure that neither UKIP nor the BNP has! 

I hope that I am wrong and that my pessimism is just a product of old age.  St Paul told us that when all else fails Faith, Hope and Love remain, and that the greatest of these is Love.  Quite so, but Hope and Faith are not optional extras.  We can’t live for long without them.  Dante got it right when, at the entrance to Hell, he imagined a posted warning, 'All hope abandon, ye who enter here!'

Some later thoughts

          I wrote the above before the Chancellor of the Exchequer made his ‘Autumn Statement’ and I had wondered if it might contain anything that would persuade me to change it.  It didn’t.  It is clear that the outlook is every bit as bleak as it had appeared to be and that for those in the public service it is even worse. There are to be more job losses, and pay rises capped at one percent when the current wage freeze ends. 

            There is room for argument about who was responsible for the current economic situation.  The Government insists that it was all the fault of the previous Labour Government (but then they would, wouldn’t they?)   The Governor of the Bank of England, who really should know and has no axe to grind, has told us – and reiterated – that the greed and incompetence of the bankers was to blame. 

            I think it likely that both are right.  The bankers were directly to blame but the New-Labour Government was guilty of failing to curb them (but then I doubt very much if any possible alternative government would have done differently). Nobody suggests for one moment that teachers, doctors, nurses, refuse collectors and other public servants were in any way to blame.  Yet it is they who are being punished while the bankers continue to walk away with telephone number salaries and bonuses.

It should be remembered that with inflation at 5 percent, a wage freeze is in effect a 5 percent wage cut – and a pay increase of one percent is just a slightly smaller cut. Thousands of public servants are losing their jobs. Those who keep theirs are to suffer continuing pay cuts, and are expected to work longer and pay more for a smaller pension!   Public servants are overwhelmingly not soul-less bureaucrats who spend their days sending each other memos.  They provide the foundation on which profit-making private enterprise can function; the personal and public health services, the highways, the fire and police services, the social services safety net and, come to that, the armed forces. We neglect them at our peril.  Yes – had I still been in the public service as I was for over forty years, I would, however reluctantly, have certainly joined the strikers last Wednesday.

    As for the belated capital expenditure on the infrastructure that it is hoped will create jobs and lift us out of recession, it is too little, too late.  Much of it is simply trying to put right things that the government got wrong in the first instance!

  In our region, for instance, much is being made of road widening on the A14 – a project that obviously makes sense, generating jobs in construction and facilitating the transport of goods from the Midlands to Felixstowe for export.

  A blog reader points out that there is nothing ‘new’ about this initiative. Together with, for instance, the School Building Programme, this had been agreed by the previous government, but was one of the first to be dropped by the new Coalition Government when it came to power.  Roads Minister Mike Penning said that the scheme was unaffordable and no longer offered acceptable value for money.

            My correspondent asks, ‘How many construction jobs might have been saved, and how many manufacturing companies would by now have had their exports streamlined if the scheme hadn’t been cancelled in the first place?’  

              

‘Sing, Choirs of Angels!’

    When, three weeks ago, under the above heading I wrote about choir-master Gareth Malone’s success in creating a community choir from the residents of what I described as a ‘New Town’ near London, I little thought that a fortnight later we would be watching on BBC2 his revisit there after two years – with lots of highlights from his earlier success.

   I was glad to discover that my memory of the original programmes hadn’t been too faulty.   I hadn’t remembered the name of the ‘New Town’.  It was, in fact, South Oxhey in Hertfordshire, less a ‘new town’ than an enormous and soul-less housing estate – until Gareth’s genius turned it into a living community!   As I wrote in my blog, he had brought his South Oxhey Community Choir up to a standard at which its members were able to sing very professionally the Agnus Dei (O Lamb of God) prayer, in Latin, to an appreciative audience in St Alban’s Cathedral!

   That wasn’t the whole story.  During the nine months that Gareth spent in South Oxhey he created not just one but three choirs – the original community choir, a children’s choir from local schools, including one school for children with special educational needs, and a ‘male voice choir’ from regulars of local pubs whose previous choral experience had been limited to Karaoke after having had a pint or two to dull their inhibitions!

   The climax of his visit had been an open-air concert on a football field given by the three massed choirs to an audience that must surely have consisted of most of the population of South Oxhey!

  That was in 2009.  On his revisit earlier this year Gareth Malone received an enthusiastic welcome from his friends in South Oxhey and was delighted to find that the Community Choir was still flourishing, with another enthusiastic choirmaster.  It was still giving much-acclaimed performances before large audiences and was still making its contribution to binding the inhabitants of South Oxhey into a living community!

   I was reminded how, in my childhood and long before the advent of television, church socials had been one of the highlights of our lives.  My dad, who could play any stringed instrument, and two or three of his friends, had formed a small band for these occasions which always included a spell of ‘community singing’. We sang ‘Clementine’, ‘Cockles and Mussels’, ‘There’s a Tavern in the Town’ and ‘Jerusalem’ with gusto (I remember their words to this day!) and a few songs both from World War I, of which many present still had sad memories, and of other earlier conflicts;  Keep the Home Fires Burning!’  ‘There’s a long, long trail a’winding……’ and ‘Tramp, tramp, tramp the boys are marching’ (a prisoner of war song from the American Civil War) were particularly popular.  I little guessed how prophetic of my own future the last of these was to be!

 There was a community spirit in those pre-television days that doesn’t exist today.  Perhaps community singing had something to do with it.  It would have been nice to have had a Gareth Malone to encourage us to keep it up!

'A damp squib?'

    David Cameron is surely an authority on damp squibs.  He has had plenty of experience of them.

However, when he uses that expression to describe a general strike of  two million workers from every walk of life, which closed a majority of our schools and affected every one of us in one way or another, it makes me hope that we will never encounter a dry one!