A difficult week for a member of the family. An easy week for me. ‘It's not fair‘. Little girls tend to say that quite a lot. My little girls used to chorus it regularly, their whines tingling up my spine until a cup of tea after bed time. The logical part of me tends to say that we make our own luck and life goes tits up due to our own poor judgement but, as my little ones used to say about whatever it was, ‘it's not fair’ is often just as fair an assessment.
I have a vivid memory from school. Lanky, deep voiced Mr Tinson, usually funny, looked ancient to me but younger than I am now, was in serious mood. Apropos of something now unremembered, he told his class of 29 thirteen year olds that one of us would be dead before the age of 30. In a generational coincidence, Nina was told the same thing while she was at school.
I never thought more of the concept until the first time that a school friend died. Not a friend, or someone I knew well. A nodding aquantence in the way of school life. She died aged seventeen having accidentally driven her new car over a pier and into the sea. I remember her name, her long blonde hair and her laugh from across the sixth form common room. It shook me up at the time. It was a big story in the news and a man on the bus commented loudly, knowing nothing, that it must have been a suicide. It wasn’t. The coroner found that she had mistaken the reverse for a forward gear in an unfamiliar vehicle and bunny-hopped the car as a new driver will. Bad luck that she happened to be parked on a unfenced pier at high tide. I got off that bus, and got over the shock in the way of the young. It was part of growing up.
Last week, a school friend of Nina’s died. Not a friend, just a boy who happened to be in her form. A nice enough boy who had said hello to her, who was a bit naughty and cheeky until his last year at school when his teachers threats to give him a poor reference for his application to join the Army turned him into an angel. He joined up at sixteen, and died at twenty, it was a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. He was a specialist in disarming those bombs. The army was his life, but he was looking forward to coming out soon and starting civilian life. A new military campaign has been all over the national news. They say it is going well. The local news carried nice footage about the young man’s death, with intervews with his friends and family. The school said that everyone is in shock.
There can be no proper response. I find myself no more eloquent in thought, word or deed than when I was Nina’s age. It’s not fair.
Life goes on and with it the little disappointments and patches of ill-health. My poor baby, it isn’t fair.
Dulce et decorum est is Latin from Horace although I know it from the poem by war poet Wilfred Owen which I was studying around the time Vanya died. The meaning is,’It is sweet and right’. If you don’t know it, please read the poem for the rest. http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen1.html
This post is dedicated to the memory of Vanya Bray 1969-1987 and Guy Mellors 1989 - 2010
http://helmandblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/sapper-guy-mellors-killed-in.html
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