LIVING IN FRANCE, THE ILLUSION OF PEACE
I Grew Up In The Shadow of WW2; Fear of Another War Haunted My Childhood. Now, As Air Raid Sirens Sound In Ukraine, I Fear For The Children
Born at the end of the war, I had no actual recollection of bombs and destruction, but I’d absorbed plenty of my mother’s stories — the blood-chilling sound of the air-raid warnings, the scramble to shelters for safety as German bombs rained down.
She’d kept the tiny child’s gas mask in a box in the attic. A rubber contraption, ugly and sinister it fascinated and chilled me in equal measure.
Every new threat and accompanying saber-rattling terrified me anew. Soviet troops marched into Hungary. An overheard remark from an uncle. “That bloody ‘Nasser’s going to start another war . . .”
I’d rush to my mother for assurance.
“There won’t be another war, will there? Do you think there will be another war? “But there won’t be . . .”
My mother, never very political, went on knitting and told me not to worry because it wasn’t good for my asthma or my eczema. “Stop scratching,” she’d say. “Nothing you can do about it anyway, is there?”
Every night, I’d send my plea to a higher authority.
Please God, let my mum and sister be alright, and don’t let there be any more wars.”
We’d emigrated to the United States by the time of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. I was eighteen, madly in love with a boy I’d just met, and terrified mostly because he said if things got really bad with Cuba, he’d probably be drafted. It puzzled me that he seemed to relish the prospect.
It should have been a warning.
It wasn’t. Three years later we were married with two children. He’d joined the Marine Corps and went off to Vietnam. He returned and we divorced, I wore love beads and marched for peace.
War. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.
Year after year. More idiotic wars, more senseless loss of life. Today, as I write this Ukraine is under attack. Air raid sirens going off in several major cities and residents scurrying to shelters for safety.
It’s all happening just a day or two’s drive from where I live in southern France. No idea why, but I checked Google maps and had the directions sent to my phone. They came with a warning that I’d pass through several countries with different Covid regulations.
There would also be tolls.
If I avoided the internet, the radio, the TV broadcasts, I could do like John Lennon and imagine ‘no countries and nothing to kill or die for.’
Imagine all the people, living life in peace.
In my small village, that wouldn’t be hard to do. The vineyards are deep in winter slumber, but clouds of forsythia and almond blossom hint at spring. I listen to the rumble of a tractor moving slowly down the street. As I write this, a dove with plumage the color of the overcast sky hops onto my balcony and looks directly at me.
Earlier this morning the loudspeaker van cruised the streets, as it always does on Thursdays, announcing the weekly market. Women appeared with shopping baskets. The coquillage (shellfish) van also stops by on Thursdays, people line up in the square to buy oysters and strange sea creatures only the French seem to understand.
People living their lives in peace.
But not in Ukraine where some ten-year-old girl is listening to the sounds of shelling and bomb blasts and begging her mother to promise there won’t be another war.
Sadly, I think it may be too late.
“. . .there will be warning signals for all citizens. There will be television, radio, and internet announcements, messages to mobile phones, sirens will sound, patrol cars and fire engines will go through the city with loudspeakers to tell people what to do.”
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