A Memory Miscellany

 "Off to town with half-a-crown, to buy a jar of honey ..."

When I got up this morning, I decided to write about the dream I'd just had but now, having been to town and returned (without honey after spending well over a hundred times a half-a-crown), the memory of it has evaporated.  Instead, I'll share a few other memories that haven't gone away.

Two of the few groups I follow on Facebook relate to memories of the past.  One recently featured a short series of long posts narrating a walk along a specific bus route that the writer travelled regularly in his boyhood.  At one point he described the experience of accompanying his mother into a hardware shop, saying that he no longer remembered much about the shop itself 'apart from the smell and the wooden floor'.  My own memory was triggered, and I recalled a similar shop in my hometown.  The smell - a mixture of paraffin and machine oil, although I couldn't identify it at that age - and the echo of the wooden floorboards on the hollow of the cellar underneath came very quickly to mind.

A recent post to the other of these groups - directly linked to my hometown and its surrounding area - asked about the town's experiences, if any, of enemy action during World War II.  I reported a comment made by my mother about a plane strafing a particular street, only to be contradicted by another contributor saying that it was actually a different street.  I felt that either my mother's memory (she now being long gone and unable to corroborate it), or my own of what she had said, were being challenged.  A day or so later, someone else posted in support of my offering, specifying the shopfronts that had been hit by machine-gun fire ... one of which was directly opposite the shop where my mother was working at the time.

And this is being written the day after a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.  

The newspapers provide graphic images of the damage in Gaza of more than a week's bombardment and I draw a parallel between these and the familiar pictures of the London blitz of 1940/41.  I realise that the minuscule damage suffered by our small Norfolk town is off the scale compared to either of these.  

A comparison of the Norfolk so familiar to me and the Gaza strip is quite revealing.  Norfolk is just under fifteen times the size of Gaza, while its population is less than half ... and most of that is concentrated in and around the city of Norwich.  The entire length of Gaza equates in round terms to the distance between Norwich and my hometown of Diss.  It's a comparison that is almost impossible to visualise.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the claims of either side - and just a moment's research reveals that they are many and complex - the devastation of the last eleven days, along with that of the many previous outbursts of violence in this area, are not the way to find a solution.  Those who have died, and the families that remain to grieve, suffer the consequences of where they were born; the origin of the situation in which they find themselves stretches back to a time before the lives of any of them and fighting between these two twenty-first century neighbours will solve nothing.

I don't have an answer - I doubt if anyone has - but peaceful, civilized negotiation is the only way to achieve a lasting peace.