Nostalgia and remembrance

I went to my grandson’s church parade for Remembrance Sunday today. The cub pack he belongs to meets in the local barracks, so the wreath laying on the monument and the service seemed extra relevant with all these young soldiers present.

I thoroughly enjoyed singing the hymns – they were the old ones that we used to sing every morning in assembly in school. I always enjoyed singing the hymn – usually it was the best bit of the day, because frankly I hated school. I was always bunking off – how I got my O Levels, I don’t know.

Anyway, I heard Alan Bennett on radio 4 and he was waxing nostalgic about hymns in school, and, it seemed to me, the past in general. But I’m sure that children enjoy singing the tunes they sing today, just as much as we enjoyed singing the old hymns, and they may well understand the words better.

I’m very suspicious of nostalgia, which I tend to regard as a particularly English vice; I don’t know that it is especially English, but it seems very prevalent.  In spite of enjoying the hymns, I can’t forget that we were controlled at school by being humiliated and belittled. At my junior school, there was an older boy, who was always kind to me and perhaps not that bright, and often in trouble. I think he was the only one daft enough to get caught. He was caned. I shall never forget my indignation, and how I couldn’t get anyone else to share it. “Well, he must have deserved it. It won’t do him any harm.” But it did me harm, if not him.

When people get nostalgic about days past, when people were more honest and you felt safe on the streets at night, and no one had heard of paedophilia, it drives me mad. It just wasn’t reported. We might have lost some good things, but we’ve also lost an awful lot of horrible stuff. I don’t believe in trying to hang on to what’s past. Things change. Even the best things don’t last forever. But good things are ahead of us too, and changes can be greatly for the better. Let go, and move on. That’s my motto. Not in the American sense of “moving on” after the loss of someone loved. That’s a weird idea, as though you could move on and leave them behind. Of course, that’s just what you can’t do; they are part of you, they helped to make you what you are, even if their life was brief, you can never be the same as you were before you loved them. So that brings us back to Remembrance Sunday.

When I was a child, people were always saying to me, “Of course, you never knew your uncle. He was lovely.” He was killed in 1942, and twenty years later, people who’d known him only slightly were still remembering him. My mother and my granny never got over his death. At least he died in the war against Hitler’s Germany, a war for survival, with few moral complications. How would they feel if he had died in Afghanistan?  How on earth can politicians think they can ever be forgiven for the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq, when every loss causes such irreconcilable grief?