I'm feeling sad

I’m not a political blogger and I’m not going to start ranting politics now. I don’t know who is right or wrong in Syria, in Israel or Gaza, in Russia and the Ukraine. Conflicts can take years and the rights and wrongs become murky and muddied as each side uses might to try and win.

But yesterday the news was too much. Too much to ignore. Too much to bear.

Children killed in Gaza on a beach. I live by the sea, I see children on the beach everyday. The image of children playing and then running for cover as shelling starts, only to be too slow and to die in a violent and terrifying way, played over and over in my mind, with the backdrop of our stretch of beach, gentle waves lapping at the shore.

A passenger plane, filled with people travelling for work, for pleasure, off on holiday, to visit relatives, to attend a medical conference, shot out of the sky. 298 people, including children and babies, dead in an instant. No one needs to take responsibility, we are all responsible. Wars and fighting affect us all even those far away. This tragedy helps to bring home the fact that no one is able to ignore a conflict and hope it goes away. What is the answer? I don’t know, and that is a bigger tragedy. How can anyone stop a war? More fighting? I’m at a loss. I feel lost and sad and angry and helpless.

Last night there was a storm in the UK, lots of loud thunder, rolling and rumbling in the night. Bright flashes of lightning. I wondered how it must be for a parent to lay in bed and hear shelling not thunder. For the crashes to be bricks falling. For the flashes to be fire and explosions. I do not know how anyone can survive mentally, day to day, with that kind of stress. This is not  a political post. It’s a sad post. A post where I don’t know what to do to help and yet somehow feel I must do something.

I am a mother, hearing about children dying is like hearing about my child dying. I cannot read an article or hear a news story about a mothers pain without tears of my own. I am far away and cannot help, don’t know what to do but my tears are real.

Copyright: artisticco / 123RF Stock Photo

What are you doing? Ignoring the news? Donating? Writing? Do you feel as lost as I do?

Links to aid agencies that are contributing to humanitarian aid in these areas.

 http://www.worldvision.org.uk/ways-give/make-donation/syria-crisis-appeal/

http://www.redcross.org.uk/syriacrisis/

http://www.icrc.org/eng/donations/index.jsp

Remember

I remember the fallen.

 I think of the struggle and pain of individual men and women fighting all over the world. 

And I don't like it. 

The remembering of the war, the great war, the war to end all wars, was to ensure it never happens again. We are not doing very well: but still I remember. This year as always I shall be silent at 11am on the 11th day of the 11th month and think of the dead. I shall pray that sometime in the future the dead we remember will not be recent dead but soldiers from long in the past. Pray that eventually we will come to our senses and stop killing each other.

A war time memory.

"My daughter was born at my sister’s house in November 1944. I returned home with her when she was three weeks old. I had photos taken at a studio soon after we arrived home. These were to be the only photos of my daughter before the accident. I hadn’t collected them from the photographers at the time of the plane crash so they survived.

Mosquito De Havilland

The plane crash was on the morning of Saturday 17th February 1945.

I had put my daughter outside the front door in her pram. I then went into the bedroom to tidy myself and to put my coat on. I was looking in the mirror when I saw this huge plane coming into the garden, it was silent, no engine. I thought that my baby would be all right as the plane was coming toward the back of the bungalow, so remembering what we had been told to do during raids etc. I lay on the floor. The last thing that I remembered was debris falling on me, which must have knocked me out for a few seconds. I came to and my wardrobe was holding up the ceiling where I was lying. I scrambled up, thinking that I must get to my baby, I walked through the bedroom to the lounge, there wasn’t a wall there any more and no glass in the windows. I fell out of the window and my friend was there and she helped me out.

I rushed round to where the pram was shouting “MY BABY!” by that time the bungalow was alight and burning rubble had fallen onto the pram. I was pulled away, still screaming for my baby but I was held back. A man who was visiting his brother’s family across the road ran over, and with his bare hands got my daughter out of the pram. When I saw how badly she was burnt I wished that God had taken her, as her little face was burned also her arm and hand. The man who lived opposite was about to take a bride to her wedding, but no more ado he came and took us to the hospital, ribbons flying.

I don’t think that I have ever spent a more unhappy night, my baby was crying and I couldn’t pick her up as my hands were bandaged, so I continually called the nurse. Eventually the Matron came and said, “ What are you making all the fuss for?”

The next day a Doctor came from East Grinstead hospital and we were taken there and we stayed for three months. Fortunately my baby was still able to breast feed. Which helped to save her life. She had saline bathes everyday and was the youngest patient they had ever had.

My husband was serving in India at the time of the crash and didn’t even know that he had a daughter until she was about four months old. He didn’t know about the accident because his mother had written to him and just said that I couldn’t write as I had hurt my hands. (I used to write several times a week).

The first thing that he knew about it was when one of the fellows that was with him had the Local newspaper sent to him and this news was on the front page. You can imagine the shock. He put in for leave but wasn’t allowed to come home. Our daughter was nearly two years old before he came home and saw her, he walked through the door and she was in her high chair, my husband kissed me and she said, “Oh Mama!”.

We spent years going to and fro to East Grinstead for her to have skin grafts; she had the last one when she was sixteen.

There were five people killed that day including both pilots, we were the only two saved."

The memorial to those that died

Record of the crash on Flight Safety Org
(My Grandmother, Jan 1917 - June 1999  wrote this account in about 1995, the baby is my mum)