Don’t mention the war?

22 May Don’t mention the war?

A friend challenged me to write something about the war in the Ukraine, set down some thoughts and try to articulate how it was affecting me. A group of us who regularly share writing had done this during the Covid pandemic – encouraging one another to write down our responses to what was happening to us all. That it was happening to us all in a direct way made it easier to write, gave me the sense I had permission to say something about it. The Ukraine war is a different matter.

The challenge made me realise that the immediate impact has been on writing itself. It’s a long time since the last blogpost, which was about the war and especially the sense of panic and helplessness that I think many people shared at the beginning. What followed for me was almost total writing silence. The pen ran dry; the keyboard no longer glanced at me with its beckoning eye. Of course, the war was not the only reason for a lapse into wordlessness. There were other things going on; life stuff gets in the way, distracts, dulls the spirit sometimes. But then the longer it goes on the harder it is to get started, like the silences in conversations with people you don’t know very well, an awkwardness creeps in.

There were moments when I thought: don’t worry about it, just write something about the season, the world waking up as spring races headlong into summer and there is so much beauty all around. Why does it rush past in a way that winter never does? I want it to pause for longer on its march into the middle of the year. Maybe that’s the thing to do, let my gaze land on the extraordinary outburst of nature that takes my breath away every year; let my pen get carried away with that.

Yet it feels somehow wrong, having written about it before, to not mention the war or, at least, the bigger world. Maybe ‘wrong’ is the wrong word. This isn’t a moral crusade, just a blogpost, for goodness sake. But it’s difficult to ignore that little bit of something (is it guilt?) that scratches away at the edges as I enjoy the glorious outpouring of nature. Something in the contrasts between the images we confront each day. The chaos and destruction of streets strewn with rubble, military vehicles charred and mangled, a misshapen bicycle or broken pram, an ankle and scuffed shoe protruding from beneath a muddy tarpaulin, the dust of war sprinkled everywhere. Desolation and ugliness against a soundscape of explosions and sirens. It’s the banal, domestic things I find most distressing: curtains billowing from the gaps where walls and windows used to be, kitchen utensils scattered across broken floors, the framed photographs askew on internal walls; glimpses into private worlds suddenly destroyed. All this before you even contemplate the tear-stained faces of the embattled and dispossessed. 

Contrast that with the scene in front of me. It’s a warm, sunny Sunday in May and I’m sitting in the back garden, the laptop slipped into an Ikea box made of stiff cardboard and covered with cloth and turned on its side, making a hatch that shelters it from the sun and means I can see the screen as I type. The garden is strewn with orange poppies that seed themselves each year, put down new roots and give clusters of colour along the edge of the winding gravel path. Clumps of daisy-like erigeron and tall white geranium, soft tendrils of catmint edged with blue, buds on the rose that clambers through the hedge looking for light and flowers seven feet above ground. Other plants are waiting for their moment, readying themselves to delight. Nothing is broken here – apart from a couple of old terracotta pots that split in the frost and a rusted watering can in which the erigeron has seeded itself; nothing is dead, though one of the shrubs growing up the trellis is looking frail – perhaps it will revive with better care. They often do. The slugs have nibbled at the hostas but less so than last year. I can hear the gentle sound of traffic in the distance, the voices of neighbours in their gardens and the soothing buzz of bees guzzling nectar. Beauty, peacefulness and privilege – the sheer good fortune of where and when you’re born.

The garden is somewhere to shut out the world, quell the feelings of guilt and the anger at injustice, step away from the sense of impotence. I will write about the war, as my friend suggested. She is right. At a time when we feel so powerless, it’s a way of doing something, of keeping the people, the victims of war in mind and paying them my respects.