MƒH Our Pathway ~ Our Past, Our Present, Our Future

Moments from History

Our Pathway ~ Our Past, Our Present, Our Future

Chapter One

 I

WITHOUT AN interest in history, mirror the visit to a Garden. Everything looks lovely, interesting, beautiful, stunning even. But without comprehension of what goes on beneath the soil. The foundation upon which to rest their thoughts, feelings and aspirations is absent, moreover, undesired as just one step too far. Vision is one dimensional: ‘everything in the garden is beautiful.'

Understanding history is essential. But beware of the increasingly popular period dramas and drama documentaries that quietly suggest a ‘version’ of history out of sync with historical fact.

Are we being given fact, or an embellished ‘fact’ to help 'sell the product', keep the viewer's attention tuned in, to increase broadcast revenues?

II

If I’m not careful, I pay the price by being exposed to misconceptions in current politics, and an inability to reach down to the roots. The Lens can easily distort, suggesting that I have an accurate and thorough understanding, when I in fact do not. The Lens is so accurate today, that it is often difficult to tell whether I am looking at, for example, an original image of aircraft flying in World War 2, or a very clever piece of artwork. I praise this artwork and the skill it denotes. Not so, if it purports to be the ‘the real thing’.

Parents have an enormous role to play here.

But if parents themselves are missing the roots in historical perspective, yet have deep roots in their own political or religious ideology, this may colour their perception of the political and religious landscape which then becomes vociferous, strident, argumentative, and contemptuous, in that order, with the inevitable generational clash.

Those four adjectives sum up, for me, fairly accurately the BBC’s Thursday evening popular Question Time. We often see this in children’s absence of respect for anyone beyond their peer group. This carries over to similar news productions pitched at teenagers.

Starkly, this phenomenon is ugly when aimed at politicians; the more senior the politician, the more arrogant and baited the barbs and comments made to the politician by children who have been chosen to form the group that the politician will address.

III

If live, the situation worsens, the questioner's body language - almost a physical stench oozing out of the screen - that unforgiving, sullen expression remain firmly set, becoming more pronounced, showing instead contempt, even hatred, for the politician, even though that politician gives a perfectly valid and respectable explanation to the question.

It is shocking when that politician is the prime minister.

Such is now the contempt of current society for anyone.

Our society cannot abide deference, yet in the same instance, cannot get enough of period dramas that rest entirely on deference.

When, later, asked by the TV presenter apparently now 'off camera' but actually very much 'on camera', the teenager tripping over her parents' years of goading and misteaching, we not only see it exacerbated but we see something else: the presenter's own sense of revulsion, but neatly and professionally concealed, when the questioner replies that her views have, as a result of the prime minister's reply, become even more entrenched, and so as she'd always intended to do anyway, would spoil her voting papers on the day. Up north, we call them foot-whets. Remove the dialect by using your own dialect and you’ll possibly get a light-bulb moment.

I’ll not forget that presenter’s alarm, that look of ‘what on earth is the point in me doing this?’

Thus we come to that car bonnet - car trunk - collision, the result of a lack of guidance and teaching by parents, and indoctrination of their children without any understanding of historical events. It goes beyond the parents; for, very often, grandparents too have failed to take the initiative, in a way that was unknown to my own upbringing in the 1950s.

Chapter Two

Hollywood Revisionism

I

I watch with alarm the spectre of revisionism through the lens of directors and producers, not only in Hollywood, Pine Tree, and all the famous film studios worldwide.

This betrays my age. I watch so-called 'docu-dramas' and find no link with the facts I lived through, no link with the facts I learned, but instead, history revised to require me to watch through the lens of the 21st Century.

I started to watch the new BBC drama World on Fire this week (October 2019). 25 minutes was 25 minutes too long. The actors had no concept of the characters and personalities of the people they believed they accurately portrayed when they are, themselves, too young to imagine a world before 1990, let alone even 1980. So, four decades back from that is a non-starter.

But hold to, for a moment, my generation.

As my brother-in-law very perceptively reminded me, But Ken, 1980 is 42 years ago! That is nine years short of half a century.

II

Historical facts are revised, dummed down. That particular drama's attempt lost me in the first five minutes in its portrayal of the Wehrmacht massing behind woodland on the Polish Border.

Stick some props in oddly fitting, mismatched, Nazi uniforms ... it'll be fine; the punters won't notice; and anyway, we've got it right. We've done our research. Those who lived then are dead now; those who aren't, well, frankly, they don't count. Most are in care homes and totally out of it.

That, I hasten to add, is a paraphrase.

Simple things like the wartime blackout test a director's understanding of history and interpretation for their audience. What I remember are the chilling accounts from my parents, all four grandparents, and aunts and uncles, of the absolute and unyielding darkness they described to me in that one ominous phrase, "total blackout".

In fact, darkness is too light a noun. It was blackness.

Hollywood will happily show an air raid on London at the height of the Blitz with actors milling around in the garden in RAF No 1 Dress uniforms, drinking, cavorting, girls laughing, and even mocking the raid in the scripts they’re required to speak to cam; doors and windows wide open, curtains drawn back, lights ablaze, even the taxi waiting with its headlights full-on. And because the RAF chap is Brad Pitt, well then, it’s got to be right!

III

Today's generation?

Well, that must be accurate! There's no way you could achieve a total blackout! It’s simply impossible.

A good researcher will go a step further. She asks to see the director and producer.

What is it? Be quick!

You’ve got too much light.

What are you talking about?

You were fined for showing even ‘a chink of light’!

Oh, that’s just folklore. Silly minds pass down facts that are baloney.

Have a look at these.

What?! You’re in the damned way.

These stats.

Stats? What the **$£ am I paying you for?!!?

These were the fatalities killed by road accidents during the war. And that’s just London. I’ve got similar figures for Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Belfast, Liverp.. ..

Get her off-set. I’m not interested.

Right. Camera One. I want plenty of light on that airman as he sips his drink against the back door. Open it wider. Yeah, that’s good. We can see the party in the front room. Get those two on the settee doing a kiss n cuddle.

Sound. Give me some bombs falling nearby. Yeah, that’s good. Brad, I need you to look pensive. Come on! There’s an air raid on!!

IV

In a wartime publication Fighter Pilot by Paul Richey, Flight Lieutenant Richey (1916-1989), a fighter pilot with the Royal Air Force gives a chilling description of the blackout from the air. He is observing this country from above, at night time, he is shocked at the totality of blackness.

This reminded me of another pilot's recollection - my father’s brother, in 1942 explaining to their mother in a letter home how black Oxfordshire was at night time; how he could see an air raid in the far distance but as we're on night flying training mum, don't worry, we stay away, but we can see the searchlights, and then expressing his pleasure when, because it is so dark, we can lose our way; but have no fear. We have a great system. We fly to a searchlight battery, we flash our navigation lights to say we are looking for the nearest airfield, and they happily oblige by shining one beam horizontally in the direction of the airfield - our pathway in the sky Mum, so I quite like night flying. It's a challenge, and you know me!

The prism of enlightened history comes back into focus. Even though I wonder how that observation sidestepped the wartime censors.

I recalled in that instant two things from my early 1950s childhood:

1 Why are all the blinds in 25 Windsor Street jet-black and fitted right to the paintwork, Grandma? Absolutely tight.

2 Recalling my parents, why was Grandad fined for ‘showing a light’?

That expression, a chink of light, comes direct from that period of history when total war prevailed. And years later, as a constable, I came across the wartime records and, sure enough, Grandad's name - Frank Erwat Marshall - appeared in the register as being fined for showing a light - two shillings and sixpence - written as 2/6nd - today, £14.

£1 in 1940 is valued in 2020 at £56.35.

2/6nd (two and sixpence) is also known as half a crown. It equates to 25 pence. So the fine was £14 which, in short, was approaching a month’s wages for my mother’s father.

Chapter Three

When Nature is Overruled by the Engineer because he knows best …

I

Self-contained, these weeds of misunderstood factors present a little long-term problem.

When pollinated to the next generation, a tiny part of democracy is permanently erased.

Erasure in the landscape presents a patch of fertile ground and it is not long before populist ideas move in, take root, take over, and with the speed and efficiency of the most virulent bindweed, the gardener’s nightmare.

Take note. Populism is just the politically correct term for Fascism.

II

If I decide to improve the land and water flow by engineering, to enable the free-flowing water to run even more efficiently direct into the city, it will do so by engineering. I remove the bends, build up the banks and flood defences and ignore the voice at the back … but this is a flood plain. It’s meant to flood. But money speaks.

Be quiet! You live in a bygone age. Flood plains? Look! We’ve drained them, and now we have farmland.

And then the rains come, and keep coming; that very direct river, shed of its former meanderings, hurtles at breakneck speed, and suddenly the city is flooded and Bob-a-Job the Engineer watches his fifty grand brand new Volvo 4 by 4 hurtling straight down the street on a torrent of water, decapitated by the underneath of the railway bridge.

When I remove Nature’s way of delicately balancing land and water, farm and wildlife, I become a wrecking ball.

The moment I start slowing the river down, allowing it to meander, Nature quickly takes back what is rightly hers, wildlife returns, and so too that delicate balance, and the city notices that it, too, can withstand the natural floods.

A case in point?

Sure. Study what happened in Carlisle, England’s northernmost city, ten miles from the Scottish Border.

Study too, what happened when the problem was realised, understood, and the community reversed engineering’s demands. [i]

When Nature and Engineering are hand-in-hand, we are close to perfection. The moment I decide to engineer something in my garden independent of any thought for Nature, I have a problem and it will not be too long in washing away my pathway and all my work. Suddenly, I have metamorphosed into the wrecking ball.

Conclusion

I need to be very careful today about how I convey historical fact.
I need to do my research.
I need to discuss that research with historians.
And in this regard, I am truly indebted to one such historian, JDE.

18 April 2024
All Rights Reserved


LIVERPOOL

© Kenneth Thomas Webb 2023

First published on 2 October 2019 and redrafted on 25 February 2023 for release on 9 September 2023.

Footnotes

[i] Simon Reeve in his outstanding BBC series The Lakes with Simon Reeve ~ Episode 2 and available on BBC iPlayer

Last published 9 September 2023