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In Harm’s way
WHAT AN EMOTIONAL roller coaster London, and indeed all of Britain, has been on this summer. One evening in July, the crowds are dancing in the fountains of Trafalgar Square and bonhomie overflows out the doors of pubs from Hammersmith to Greenwich: London has been awarded the honor of hosting the 2012 Olympics! The next day, as all the world knows, the Underground lines radiating from King’s Cross are rocked with the explosions of our present war without boundaries.
Once again the people of London showed the indomitable spirit of John Bull.
Certainly the collective heart of the civilized world goes out to the families, friends, city and country that bore this attack. Once again the people of London showed the indomitable spirit of John Bull in failing to be cowed by a brutal threat to our heritage and way of life. They had, as we were reminded, been through this before.
Brenda Lewis’ childhood memoir of England during WWII prompted war-era memories for a number of readers. We share a few of those in “Our Sceptered Isle.” Elaine Roberts’ letter, however, reminds us of the reality of living in London through those years: “My family and I were ‘bombed out’ from four homes in three years. Most nights I sat with my dear mother nursing wounds or covering the dead. Frequently we dug for bodies with our bare hands to free those trapped in craters and rubble.”
Humankind likes to feel it has made moral progress over the centuries. As the French recall, however:
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Today, as in the London of the early 1940s, we all live in harm’s way.
Our series on the four great British colonial migrations to these shores continues in this issue. Perhaps we need to be reminded as well that today’s insecurities can hardly be compared to the physical dangers and depredations faced by English settlers on these shores. Between disease, deprivation and Indian warfare, mortality rates in early Virginia, for instance, boggle our 21st-century sensibility.
If living in harm’s way is a constant in human experience, however, so is the collective tenacity of will in the British people. The same strength of human spirit that persevered in settling the North Atlantic shores walked the quarterdecks of Nelson’s fleet in the Napoleonic wars, was celebrated by Tennyson’s poetry through the years of Victorian empire and was present in a gruff, grubby scholar who spent nine years of his life compiling the first English-language dictionary.
As in the great wars of the 20th century, that intrinsic resolve in the Anglo-American character is being called upon once again to make the world safe. And once again, it will succeed. Issue by issue, it is the delightful mission of to remind us why.
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