I looked in
the garden today as the whole country fell silent for the two minute
tribute to those lost in wars and conflicts. In the distance there
was a pigeon, which appeared to be standing up right in respect as
not a word was (or a squeak) spoken. Not even the sound of a child in
the distance was heard and the birds gathered around a kind of
toadstool out there, eating the bits of scraps we sometimes leave
there. Yesterday about twenty gulls must have flown in from the coast
with the biggest actually on top of the toadstool; you can just about
see it, above, near the base of one of the trees. Sorry the photo
isn't that clear.
When the
two minutes of silence were up, a shot was fired and all the birds
flew away.
From a
couple of places they flew in flocks and there was a lot of tiny bird
activity too.
This year
is also the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the
Somme; on the day it started, in July,1916, 20,000 men were
killed.
Stop and
think about that number.
A few
seconds before the first shot was fired, at the Somme, there must
have been a lot of bird activity but as soon as it was fired and
heard by those birds the Somme must have fallen as silent as our
garden did today at 11.02 am and the dawn chorus wasn't heard again
till November; four months and over one million killed and wounded.
One of those was my granddad, who survived, and no matter how we
remember them, and old soldiers remember the battle, it was all for
nothing.
Or maybe it
brought Europe together eventually, after another war twenty years
later, when the Common Market was formed and instead of fighting we
all started working and living in each other's countries where we
lived and played together in harmony – but you don't believe that
do you?
The
preachers of hate wanted us out.
When I was
listening to the silence, and not John Cage's (4'33”), I thought of
the presidential election; the presidential election of 1960 when
John Kennedy won and moved his beautiful family in to the White House
(Casablanca?) in January 1961; where it would continue the curse that
befell them and continued right up to the time when we lived there
when John Jr was killed.
But I
remember Kennedy's inauguration and the tears in my mother's eyes as
Kennedy was an Irish man – Roman Catholic and handsome. I even
remember some of his campaigning as he had a profile on his publicity photos on the posters showing the parting in his hair; or the part,
as they call it in America.
I
knew nothing of his opponent, Nixon, or the arrangement made by
Kennedy's crook of a father with Sam Giancana of the Mafia to 'buy
Chicago' for his son I just knew that Camelot was moving in to the
White House.
But I also remember the tears of pain in my mother's eyes as they
laid him to rest after Oswald shot him – and that gave rise to a
whole lot of paranoiac conspiracy theories which has made millions
for the promoters of such bullshit.
But
now, instead of the Camelot of the Kennedys and the beauty and intellegence of the
Obamas we have the waxworks of the Trumps – Gawd 'elp us!!
