November

Bonfire Night draws near and it is striking how close it is to Poppy Day when, in the murky November evenings, the sounds of fireworks and flashes of light through the night sky seem quite reminiscent of the shells on the Somme and the Marne. It is such an evocative time of year!

First comes Halloween and it shocked me to learn that throughout history 13 million (!!) witches have been murdered in the name of religion. These witches were, for the most part, country folk who clung to the ways of Nature which now, after 200 years of industrialisation, is back on the political agenda as though the idea is something new! The so-called witches never ‘consorted with devil’ – they listened to the earth, watched the seasons, saw the grandeur of Nature and the way in which any contemplation of it inevitably leads to a sense of there being a Divine hand behind all of it. They saw the healing properties of herbs. Perhaps they danced in joy as the seasons changed....basically they were free spirits who couldn’t be controlled...and were burned as witches.

Then comes Bonfire Night – ‘Guy Fawkes Night’ – the man who not only gave his name to a kind of festival that has lasted for over 400 years, but whose name became a slang word for any man. Few people realise that the word ‘guy’ comes from this one man, who was basically a terrorist (and also a local lad in these parts - a Yorkshire man!). After several decades of religion swinging one way then another in Britain - first Henry VIII started killing Catholics, then his daughter, Mary, started killing Protestants, then Elizabeth tried to create a balance and allow freedom of worship, but was excommunicated and flt obliged to outlaw Catholicism – the country had a most ineffectual and unpleasant king in James I. The son of the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, he was a staunch Protestant, and Guy Fawkes, along with some cronies, decided to blow him to bits in the name of Catholicism. That, of course, was a really Christian thing to plan to do!! (I am, of course, being ironic). The plot having failed, Guy Fawkes was caught and hanged and to this day children stand in the street with scarecrow-like figures and ask for ‘a penny for the Guy’, who is then thrown onto the bonfire. You would think, from the countless fireworks, that there is something to celebrate in this but it is really celebrating the failure of a plot to to blow up a failure of a king. Of the many wonderful things that have happened in British history, it is bizarre that this remains a constant annual feature. No one (thank goodness!) celebrates victories at Waterloo or Trafalgar. No one celebrates the ends of the world wars. No one celebrates the Queen’s birthday really....yet this silly man and his plot to kill a silly king remains a celebration. How odd the English are! It’s probably more a question of timing than anything else. The clocks go back, we need something to lighten the gloomy nights between summer and Christmas....Bonfire Night happens.

But then comes poppy day. Already just about everyone is wearing a poppy (and so do I, but not out of hailing heroes, but as a reminder of the pointlessness of wars and out of respect for those who paved the way to this understanding). It is good, in some ways, to see that November 11th – the Armistice of World War 1 – is still remembered and all those who died in the wars are respected. The other day, though, as part of research for a book, I read a lot of articles and watched many videos about the battles of Verdun in 1916. The utterly unrelenting and incomprehensible slaughter, I thought as I saw it, was surely the biggest lesson in history about the pointless of killing other people. If only, as we pin poppies to lapels and lay wreaths at the cenotaph, we saw how nowadays - as Germans and British veterans stand side by side, and Germans and French veterans stand side by side and Japanese and all other past enemies stand side by side- it is all nothing more than a children’s game that sometimes goes very wrong. All through history in the name of righteousness, people have killed other people. Whether they be witches, Catholics, Protestants, Germans, Nazis, kings, beggars....no matter how many righteous arguments were put forth to explain why it happened, not one of those murders was justified really, was it?

So, on with the sparklers and the Roman candles, and the fun of being alive in November!

Battlefields

Recently I heard a brief news report about the necessity of making battlefields heritage sites and therefore protected land . Apparently, as the law stands at the moment, anyone can build anything on the sites where people fought and died - and there are so many of them around England. Initially, I thought, "Yes, of course, they must protect these sites...." and then began to wonder...

This rainy summer's evening, driving home as often happens across the site of Towton - the 'bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil' (with 'losses' - euphemism for slaughter - which, by the size of the population at the time are equivalent or perhaps exceed the slaughter on the first day of the Somme) - I looked across the fields and wondered whether there is an inch of land anywhere on which people didn't die and kill for someone else's beliefs. There are many people who keep alive the memory of what happened at Towton that Palm Sunday, nearly 600 years ago. They enact the battle sometimes, I think, and the same is true of all of the English Civil War battles and perhaps many others from the Wars of the Roses. Perhaps old wounds and old causes are somehow rooted in our psyche, but it's interesting that no one yet dares to re-enact or play at the First or Second World War battles. Perhaps they need that buffer of history to soften the blow of what really went on.

So, at Towton, the Lancastrians were basically massacred and it was a great Yorkist victory. But, as far as I can make out, the bizarre thing is that the Lanscastrians were were more 'northern' and the Yorkists were based more or less in the south - so, like all wars, it was nothing like it first appeared, nor was it fought for the reasons that history presents. I guess most of the thousands of young men (boys) who died that day were either just looking for a better way of life or looking for excitement. How many of them really knew what they were fighting for? Even now, centuries later, it's so hard to know what they were really fighting for.

Another odd thing about wars is that when they are over and monuments rise, we always speak of people dying for this or that just cause. It's never really mentioned that they actually killed other human beings for the same cause. There is something heroic about dying for a cause and nothing heroic about killing for one....basically, the causes are never just, and there has never been any truth in 'the old lie' (quote Wilfred Owen) 'dulce et decorum est pro patria (or anything else!) mori"

I would not like to see a car park or tower block or anything else built over Towton or any other battlefield but I sometimes think it would be beautiful if, instead of honouring 'heroes' of old wars with monuments, we simply put a wreath of flowers that said, "ooh...we made a mistake there..." and perhaps, rather than honouring where we went wrong so often in the past, we raised many more monuments in places where we got it right. Perhaps the odd daisy chain in a happy park one summer's afternoon or a bluebell filled wood one May day might say,

"Here,thousands of people came over centuries.
They spent their afternoon watching birds soar through the wisps of clouds in the brilliant blue sky,
Watching swans glide over the water,
Listening for the hum of earthworms in the soil,
The sound of grass growing,
And the love song of the bee to the buttercup.
Here, people laid aside causes and lived one happy summer's day,
and they were free."