the valour and the levity

how can we honour the war dead without feeling numb?

My grandmother Doris, who by her own admission, did not serve bravely in the Wrens — but looked smashing in dark lipstick.

Yesterday was the 80th anniversary of VE day. There are celebrations going on all over London and the rest of the UK this weekend. To mark the occasion in my own little way, this morning I walked over the to Beethoven Centre, a small community hall where for a few years I took a cheap yoga class on Wednesday mornings. The class no longer exists. My pilgrimage was because I wanted to look at the cheaply framed list that hangs on the wall beside a fire extinguisher. It’s an accounting of the men from the local neighbourhood who died in the First World War between 1914 and 1918.

I live in Kensal Green, about a quarter of a mile away, which means that list doesn’t even reflect the men and boys who undoubtedly died in my neighbourhood or even on my road — though it’s entirely possible some of them attended the same big Victorian state primary school as my own sons.

What destroys me about the list is how ordinary and plain it is compared to the rest of the city’s great statues, museums, historical plaques and cenotaphs. It’s just a compilation of the dead from one one war in one tiny neighbourhood. In 1918 this bit of North West London was basically a suburb surrounded by grazing land, meaning it was far less populated than it was a decade later when the Second War began, let alone today. The list doesn’t include the names of the WWII dead or the civilians who died in the Blitz or suffering of widows and orphans or the soldiers who came home wounded, took to drink or went mad, and yet I’m always astonished by how long it is anyway.

Just look at all those names.