Day 4 - Remember, remember

The picture is a Lysander aircraft, which was used to fly men and women carrying out clandestine operations in occupied Europe. It was capable of landing and taking off on makeshift airstrips or in fields. The ladder on the side helped people to board easily for a quick getaway!

A little while ago, I had cause to visit someone just outside the village of Tempsford in Bedfordshire. The location was isolated: in a crook of the old A1, with the new motorway roaring by on the other side of the hedge, then over a remote level crossing where our tiny lane crossed, with some care, the East Coast Mainline, and then emerged into a featureless landscape, empty except for a few lonely houses . . . and a strip of concrete.

But this abandoned strip of concrete, so I was informed, was the airstrip from which ‘Special Operation Executives’ (SOE) flew during World War Two. These brave men and women were taking off into the unknown, to operate clandestinely behind enemy lines. If they were lucky, they returned to the same remote location.

As we stood there, under the vast, silent night sky, I was suddenly aware of the stories of courage that started and ended right there.

Later, I sat with a group of women in the warmth having a cup of tea, and got chatting. There, a whole living memory unfolded. They talked about the men and women who left and never returned, or returned tortured and broken – not to forget the brave resistance workers at the other end of those flights, who risked betrayal, torture or death every day in their own towns and villages.

And, as I listened, spellbound, the women began to speak of one man, who had been flown back, so badly tortured that he could not be moved, and so traumatized that he was terrified to allow anyone into the room where he was convalescing. All his meals had to be left at the door. The family that were looking after him had a dog, which gradually won the man’s trust, was allowed into his room, and then became inseparable from him. The dog seemed to know his need for silent companionship, and became essential to his recovery.

The women who told me the story were too young to remember it first hand, but they had clearly heard it from those who had been there. It was as if that silent landscape itself held the memory, and was speaking through them.

Today, on November 5th, our landscape will be full of flashes, whistles and detonations, as we remember a much older conflict. And in a few days’ time, we will think back again to the World Wars, in what is still a world of war. But somehow, the story told by those women, while it recognized the horror of conflict and torture, brought with it a hope for healing in remembrance.

This Remembrance Day, you might sing Isaac Watts’s strange and powerful hymn, ‘Our (or O) God our help in ages past’. The hymn takes us back to the dawn of creation: ‘Before the hills in order stood’, and dwells on our mortality: ‘Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away . . forgotten, as a dream Dies at the opening day’.

The hymn ends, with the same enduring, solemn hope as it started:

Our God, our help in ages past,

Our hope for years to come;

Be Thou our guard while trouble last,

And our eternal home.

Amen

Janet Wootton