Passion-dale?

A friend once remarked about one of these articles, ‘I had to read it again to see just how you got here ... from there!’  I had to agree it was a chain of many links, so that the end bore little relation to the beginning.  I fear this post may go the same way.

I’m writing on the centenary of the start of Passchendaele;  by this time, 100 years ago, many thousands had already lost their lives, either through bullets or mud.  By the end of the battle, half a million lives had been wasted on both sides.  In the last few days, I read this account from a sergeant who had survived:  “We heard screaming coming from another crater a bit away.  I went over to investigate with a couple of the lads.  It was a big hole and there was a fellow of the 8th Suffolks in it up to his shoulders.  So I said, ‘get your rifles, one man in the middle to stretch them out, make a chain and let him get hold of it.’ But it was no use.  It was too far to stretch, we couldn’t get any force on it, and the more we pulled and the more he struggled, the further he seemed to go down.  He went down gradually; he begged us to shoot him.  But we couldn’t shoot him.  Who could shoot him?  We stayed with him, watching him go down in the mud.  And he died.  He wasn’t the only one.  There must have been thousands up there who died in the mud.”

The fact that that poor soul was from the Suffolk regiment caught my eye.  One of the many recorded on the Menin Gate or Tyne Cot memorials ‘with no known grave’, he could have been a relative of mine.  My family history researches have revealed many characters whose names I carry with me to the annual Remembrance Service, with their dates and place of commemoration.

My thoughts thus turn abruptly from the horrors of war to the pleasures of armchair researches ... and my frequent trawls through census records ten years apart in time, but only on the next page on the computer screen.  I’m amazed how often I come across couples ten or twenty years prior to marriage, living in the same street, sometimes only two or three houses apart.  The romantic in me wonders when it was that one saw the other, when it was that an attraction was first felt.  Of course these are questions no documentary record can answer.

Across the road from my home, a flat has recently been created above a motor parts store: unused space turned into living accommodation for ... whom?  The people who have moved in are, technically, my new neighbours, but it’s unlikely I shall ever know very much about them ... even less than I do about those living on my side of the road, in the same block!  It’s one of the penalties of being flat dwellers, that our lives tend to be insular, opportunities for exploratory conversation limited.

I’m reminded of a certain lawyer, who asked, “Who is my neighbour?” (Luke 10:29).  It was the response to this that we have come to know as the parable of the Good Samaritan.  At the end of the story, the lawyer is asked to answer his own question: an answer that is defined by behaviour rather than location.

Living alone as I do, it isn’t easy to relate to those around me, as I’ve said, for our paths rarely cross.  What is easier, is to relate to those I meet regularly, in clubs and societies, in the ringing chamber or at church.  It’s there that I can become known by my behaviour to others, whether I’m prepared to put myself out to help them when they are in need, or whether I choose to ignore them and carry on with my own life, interests and hobbies.

Like all of us, I suspect, my life is a mixture of these two opposites: what I spoke of yesterday to one friend at church as ‘me’-time and ‘us’-time.  Too much of one, and life is very lonely; too much of the other, and you can begin to question just who you are.  Fortunately, God loves us, whoever we are ... but I like to think He smiles more broadly when He sees us doing His will.