Postscript: Time and the Aftermath of War

A noticeable side-effect of growing older is the way one's sense of time collapses inwards. Events that seem to have happened relatively recently become talked about by a younger generation as if they were ancient history.

The upcoming 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings may start a trickle of TV documentaries on World War 2. All will doubtless claim to offer new insights, which Saturday's 'Bloody Omaha' on BBC2 certainly did. It followed a standard pattern of running for a hour whether the material needed it or not, and was padded out with the usual narrative repetition, familiar-looking old newsreel footage and colourful comments from two or three photogenic veterans.

It is the current fashion for programmes like this to be fronted by popular celebrities rather than knowledgeable experts. Richard Hammond, clown and professional semi-yob, bless him, hardly brought gravitas to this sombre subject. Instead, it was slightly surreal to hear him discussing the war with a youthful academic for whom the war seemed to be a matter of records and statistics to be interpreted whichever way one chose.

Although I'm not old enough to have experienced WW2 itself, I was born in the aftermath and grew up in a world in which its scars and consequences were all around us. Not just the physical scars of bombsites and material deprivation, but the psychological scars on the adult survivors. So it created a strange kind of deja-vu to hear the war being talked about in a way that seemed so detached from the physical reality itself. It illustrates, maybe, how the prism of historical analysis can rob events of life and context, turning them into neutral abstractions to be manipulated to suit any convenient theory.


The spur to say these things was the email I blogged about yesterday, in which I noted the enthusiastic support of corporal punishment in the schools of my childhood. Perhaps the key to understanding this is to remember the proximity of war. As I suggested at the beginning of this post, a decade or so to an adult is only a short span. Not enough time perhaps to heal hidden signs of trauma. Some of the men who taught me had seen active service and may have slaughtered other men or at least lived in daily fear of being slaughtered themselves. In their own warped thinking, it perhaps seemed right that us boys should learn that life was hard and that they should be the ones to teach us that lesson. Having survived the war, there was perhaps some faith in the Nietzschean apophthegm, "what does not kill me makes me stronger". Hmmm...