A New Friend

I visited Mrs B. the other day. She had celebrated her birthday earlier in the week. She is now one hundred years old. Neat and tidy, welcoming me into her room in an Elderly People’s Home, she said her birthday had been marvellous. She had sat in a corner and members of the family had come one by one to talk with her. She had been tired at the end of it. They had made a big thing of it in the Home as well, for she is the oldest of the thirty two residents. I asked if they were all women. No, she said, we have one man, and – a slight suggestion of disapproval here – he is made a great fuss of.

Mrs B. is one of nine children. Her father was a Methodist minister at a time when it was normal for people of that calling to move home and church every three years. So she has an encyclopaedic knowledge of English geography. The children never had new clothes, she said, but had to be content with’ hand-downs’ and her mother could perform miracles with adapting them as well as making a house full of furniture they were also landed with, into a family home.

Born soon after the beginning of the last century, Mrs B. has lived through the two major world wars and the many others that have followed them, and seen the whole character and culture of a society she was born into, change beyond recognition. She finds television intrusive, listens to the radio but finds it hard to cope with after a while, and whilst she enjoys company is always glad to retreat to her little room. I had the feeling that she was as much an observer of what was going on about her, as she is a participant.

Someone burst into the room at one stage in our conversation, brandishing a meals list. Mrs B. gently but firmly asked her to come at some other time, for the present was not convenient. And slightly chastened, the hearty helper retreated. I felt a sense of awe in meeting this little lady for the first time – I shall see her again next month – for in her quiet and dignified way she is a depository of our history as well as her own.

B.R.

Living and Studying

My eldest grandson was talking about his school work in a critical year of his education. He said, ‘have you studied the Second World War?’ ‘I was there!’ I said; ‘I don’t need to study it’. I was wrong, of course, and he was right to ask the question. Living is not the same as studying.

History must always try to take a distant view of events. As a boy moving from childhood to adolescence, I was embroiled in the consequences of war and the prejudices that accompany it. I confessed to my grandson that I was still affected by those prejudices. Absorbing an atmosphere of hatred towards Germans- ‘The Hun’ as Winston Churchill’ demonised then - it was not easy to distinguish the people from the Nazi regime that had capitalised on a national sense of inferiority following the harsh peace settlement at the end of the 1914-18 War. I still have to pause and think rationally about Germany. One of my best friends is German. He is a pastor caring for 500 elderly people living in various Lutheran homes in Frankfurt. He grew up in the devastating post-war years, when more and more was learned about the monstrous regime with which Adolf Hitler tried to exterminate a race and overwhelm the western world.

Hosted by him in the Spring of 1996, I was one of a group of eight of his friends meeting for a meal in his home. One of them had been an associate of Oskar Schindler. He told us that in the last few days he had given over 40 interviews on radio and TV, the film ‘Schindler’s List’ having just been released in Germany. Unwelcome facts were meeting memories- buried for some, still raw for others – and history was beginning to form, not as convenient myths but as uncomfortable truths.

My grandson is studying what was once part of my life and that of millions of others, and can do so in a more dispassionate way than perhaps I can. Contemporary historians however argue amongst themselves about their discipline. Once presumed to be a scientific search for historical facts, history is often now recognised as an approximate study from which the writer’s own personal judgement and experience can never be absent. So perhaps the personal judgement of my grandson and the experience of his grandpa need each other!

B.R.