11 January 2024 BBC lunchtime news refers to 7th October, 2023 as "Hamas's murderous rampage." On that day 1,139 people died, 36 of them children. The subsequent Israeli slaughter of around 23,000 Palestinians, including about 9,000 children, plus the wounding of 60,000 is termed, "a military intervention."
12 January 2024 The UK and US, having spent weeks warning about escalation of war, pile in with air strikes to “protect international shipping”.
March 2021 One of the world's largest container ships, The Ever Given, gets stuck in the Suez Canal. Its cargo is reported to include garden gnomes, dildoes and sun loungers.
Early in life my father jokingly revealed to me that the Rushbys were Vikings who had abandoned Scandinavia in favour of Lincolnshire during the 8th century. I took this light-hearted speculation as fact and quickly embroidered it, deducing that, at some point in the far distant past, a Norse deity had given Lincolnshire to the Rushbys, a deal which they inconveniently failed to write down. Our Promised Land on the East coast of England was not easy for me to visit since we lived on the Scottish border 200 miles north.
These days my early childhood seems impossibly far away and alien. I wonder if I could now understand the English that we used; after all, we had no supermarkets, television, phones, motorways and plastic. My Dad arrived home on Fridays with a brown envelope containing a few pounds in cash - his wages. On the wireless that we listened to, I read the names of the stations with interest and tried to find them on the map. One of them was Oslo. That was my only connection with Scandinavia until I fell for Agnetha from Abba in 1974.
The winter of 1962-3 was the coldest since 1740, a record that I suppose will never be broken - unless climate change cuts the Gulf Stream. For some reason the family decided to go south and visit the grandparents in Lincolnshire. The coach journey was interminable. I suffered from travel sickness and was allowed to sit up front, hence one of my earliest memories: the two walls of snow and ice, taller than the coach, stretching out into the distance across the moors, lit by feeble yellow headlights. There was a diesel-powered snowplough ahead of us, not Moses.
I was two years old, but I have one other memory of the journey. My mother thought I was going to throw up and had the driver stop. We were near Ferrybridge in Yorkshire where The Great North Road passed over a single-track medieval stone bridge. It's hard to believe now when drivers whizz past on a 6-lane motorway and barely notice the River Aire below, but in those days drivers took turns to cross. Standing in the snow on the roadside verge, the nausea faded away and I remember the driver's exasperation as we reboarded. Imagine that: over sixty years have passed, but I can still feel the man's annoyance that he had been delayed by a toddler who couldn't even vomit. If such a minor incident can scorch emotions into a two-year-old, imagine what a real trauma might do.
In Lincolnshire our visits were usually restricted to staying with grandparents in Grantham. There were baths in front of the fire in a tin tub and endless good food: Grandad was a fine gardener and Grandma was a great cook. There was a pantry cellar in the centre of the house with a marble slab shelf which was perpetually laden with pies, cakes, puddings and preserves. I would sneak down there and just inhale the aromas. My brother and I would play all day in the fields and woods around. There was only one rule that Grandad enforced: no toy guns. Even making a pistol with your hand was forbidden. He could be fierce about it.
On Sunday afternoons, Grandad would take his grandchildren to visit his friend, Mr Brewin, the clockmaker. He lived in a tall Georgian townhouse filled with gentle ticks and tocks. On his work table were fragments of marquetry and tools, among them wood chisels that I now own, stamped BREWIN on their elm handles. Mr Brewin was a tall angular man who looked rather like one of the grandfather clocks he built and serviced. His precise and kindly manner extended to children. I'd be shown the inner working of pocket watches and allowed to wind the satisfying mechanisms that he built. While he and Grandad discussed timepieces, I would sit in a corner and watch the perfect regularity of the pendulums measuring out eternity in slow soft arcs.
The two men never discussed the war that, I believe, had brought them together. Grandad was an invalid, permanently scarred by inhalation of chlorine gas at the Battle of Cambrai in 1917. Not that he told me that: it came out after he died, in a hand-written notebook. It was there that I discovered he had been a Lance Corporal in the Machine Gun Corps, the man who pulled the trigger on the Lewis gun. At Bourlon Wood three machine gun units managed to mow down several thousand German soldiers. At that time Grandad was a few days past his 18th birthday and I am certain, had no real idea why he was shooting Germans, no more than those unfortunate individuals knew why they were advancing to certain death across an open field in the north of France. No wonder he didn’t want to talk about it and spent the remainder of his life living in the dark shadow of those events. He told his son, my father, very little: only that his first time in the trenches had been so traumatic that he cried for his mother. He had been fifteen when he first enlisted. After the Army discovered he was underage, they pulled him out of France and waited till he was eighteen before sending him back.
Our route home from the Brewins passed a corner shop and we would pester Grandad to be allowed inside. Maybe we could have a tiny paper bag of sweets. But he would never agree. Years later I discovered why. The shop was owned by a certain Mr Alf Roberts and during the 1930s when people were hungry and desperate, Mr Roberts had been very even-handed in refusing credit to all. For that reason my grandparents boycotted his shop forever. Mr Roberts, of course, had a daughter called Margaret Hilda who would take his self-righteous heartlessness and turn it into a political philosophy that would win the 1979, 1983 and 1987 general elections in Britain. By then she had married and become Margaret Thatcher. The Roberts family shop now bears a blue plaque commemorating the presence of those two mean spirits while Mr Brewin's place, that gentle craftsman of infinite patience, is unmarked and forgotten.
When my parents rented a caravan on the Lincolnshire coast at Mablethorpe in 1966, I was delirious with excitement. For a whole week we would be building sandcastles and playing beach cricket. On the first morning I ran through the dunes, laughing. But as I emerged on the beach, I stood on broken glass and had to be carried screaming back to the caravan to have it dug out with a needle. It was all irrelevant anyway: the tide was out and the sea invisible beyond the featureless horizon. The Promised Land, I concluded, was not up to much.
The population of Great Britain at the outbreak of the First World War was about 46 million. During the four years of war around 1.9% of that population were killed, most of them military men who died on European battlefields. There was relatively little damage to infrastructure inside the UK.
In Gaza the percentage killed, after three months, stands at 1% but there are 7,000 people missing, presumed dead, and if we add them into the calculation it reaches 1.3%. Most were civilians. About 1.9 million people have left their homes and 60% of those homes are now rubble.
On my mother’s mantelpiece is a carriage clock with a simple but elegant marquetry design on its front. It still keeps good time. On the back, carved into the wood, is the name Brewin.