Of all the Quaker testimonies, the one I struggle with the most is the Peace testimony. And I know I’m not alone, because that is how my mother’s family came to drift away from the Ffriends, when my grandmother married her Army Officer. But the proverbial road to Damascus has just leapt up and hit me in the face…
During the course of my work, I found myself alone with a somewhat befuddled elderly gentleman, who was stuck on the floor of his flat, unable to summon up the co-ordination to haul himself back into the chair where he spends his lonely days, gently pickling himself to death. He looked up at me and gasped, “Mummy! Mummy! That’s what they cried, you know. They all cried for Mummy, no-one ever asked for Daddy…” As we struggled to give him enough purchase on the slippery carpet to get himself up again, he told me, ” I was just a sub-lieutenant – no, a snotty-nosed midshipman – we hit a mine. I was on the bridge; the Captain told me to get below and help the Sawbones. I’d never seen so much blood; I was only 16. And the Sawbones was going up and down the men who were crying and bleeding, with bones & bits sticking out, and giving them all a jab, and they died; there was nothing else he could do for them. Or that I could do, but hold them down. Mummy, Mummy, they cried; but she never came…”
He got back up eventually, and carried on down his bottle. There’s no-one to stop him and no-one to care; the terrified, horrified boy who looked at me out of his drunken eyes never, ever let anyone get close to him again. And who’s going to believe that an elderly gentleman, who until recently coped admirably for himself, is suffering from shellshock, all these years after those dreadful events? And who has had the worst of it; those boys who died in agony so long ago, or the one who lived and carried their cries inside his head all this time, alongside his survivor’s guilt?
So anything I can do, however little, I must do, to try to build a world in which this does not, cannot happen to anyone, ever again…
Tags: peace, shellshock
