24. On War.

Dearly Beloved,

It is difficult for us to cope with a war in Europe so close to home, especially because it is a war within Christendom between Christian communities. Apart from the civil war in Herzegovina, there has been peace in Europe for 77 years.

My father was 28 years old and my mother 22 when war broke out in 1939. My father was already in the Royal Navy and my mother joined the Auxillary Territoral Service. “The War” in my family continued in talk and discussion long after the fighting had actually stopped. It was the background to my childhood and was made more prominent when my mother organised her family to fly us out to Malta in 1953 where my father's ship lay in Sliema Creek. We lodged close by whilst he finished an extra year of service obligated by the Korean War. One my earliest memories is of looking down from a prop driven Vickers Viscount aircraft at the ships on the Mediterranean sea shining in the sun far below. That was the same Mediterranean where my father had seen, and had to deal with, the consequence of a merchant ship being torpedoed every night for a week when he and his ship were on convoy protection duties only ten years before.

The ambiguity of feeling that war provokes about the nature and fate of the enemy have always been a challenge to Christian teaching and to living a Christian life. Christ taught that “blessed are the peacemakers and the part of the Great Commandment which tell us to love our neighbour as oneself, are clear. St Paul's injunctions to live a life of charity, of love, is demanding enough in ordinary life, but it thoroughly, truly, difficult for us when war looms its ugly head. It is not for nothing that Christians have, via Augustine of Hippo and many others, developed ideas about what constituted a just war so that some idea of what is good is not lost to us and may be pursued when we fight one another.

My father was not a Christian believer but always spoke highly of the ships' Padre, the “Sin Boatswain” as he called him; for they had to deal with the fear of the men in war, comfort them and reconcile them to the death of their shipmates or those they pulled from the sea. My father taught me that I should not expect life to be easy and exemplified and set out for me a disciplined life. My mother was more self effacing as can be seen from the photograph of her in uniform where her officer's pip is only just visible, doubtless in deference to my father who was a fierce defender of the lower deck of the Royal Navy. At the age of five she persuaded me to become a boat boy in our church and carry the incense at the altar -- my first introduction to both the demands and the loving riches of a Christian faith.

When I was at school the war was brought into a different focus by the acclamation for Benjamin Britten's composition and first performance of The War Requiem (1962) which combined the mass for the dead with secular poems about the pity of war by Wilfred Owen written in WWI. At the end is a hopeful note of the possibility of a final reconciliation of enemies:

“I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now..."

That leads into the words “Into Paradise may the Angels lead thee:” and that is followed in turn by the Requiem aeternam.

May Peace and Grace be granted to all Christian People,

Paul.

Above: My mother in Uniform (ATS) whilst working in Portsmouth.  

Below: My Father* and his shipmates on the Flower Class Corvette HMS Petunia late in World War II. My father is seated tenth from the right in the second row showing off his badges.