WAR! WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

Well, maybe a couple of things, now you come to mention it WOAH-OH-OH-OH

Dad tells me he’s finished writing his memoirs, but that no one is allowed to read them until after he’s dead. I’m a ‘professional’ writer (aka a broke, homeless person) so from my point of view it’s insanely optimistic to assume that anyone will want to read your memoirs whether you’re dead or not. Maybe I’m jaded and cynical, but I’m pretty sure I need to be alive to get people to read my memoirs, because when I’m dead I won’t be able to stand menacingly close to them, pushing a book into their hands and mumbling about how another writer they’ve also never heard of thought it was quite good (in places).

Maybe if you could combine being dead with a devastating elevator pitch, this would be a winner. It’s a heartbreaking yet ultimately uplifting true story about how I overcame death to become the world’s first dead memoirist, I would say, projecting my voice through a spirit medium’s vocal cords and making the electric lights flicker with the energy of all those sales sending my book to number one in Amazon’s ‘Books Dictated by Dead People’ chart.

Maybe the real problem is not the lack of being dead, but that my life just isn’t interesting enough for people to want to read about. I’ve never done anything truly brave or difficult, such as running away from home to fight in the First World War (or any other war for that matter.) I’ve not flown a plane behind enemy lines, engaged in hand to hand combat, or been tortured by the Japanese (except for that one time I accidentally went to an open mic night in Tokyo.) I’ve never even had to work in a munitions factory or on a turnip farm. Making a week’s worth of meals out of a ration of egg powder, a teaspoon of sugar, and a small tin of spam presented to me by a kindly Yank in return for some blackout action is not a challenge I’ve ever had to face.

I was wise enough to be born at a time and in a place where none of that was necessary. As a consequence, my life has been incredibly boring and I have nothing to write memoirs about except my own personal trauma. Which is (boringly) a lot like everyone else’s personal trauma — mom was a compulsive liar who tried to convince me I had brain damage, dad was secretly gay — normal stuff like that, which honestly, I really should have appreciated more at the time.

But I did not appreciate anything at the time. I didn’t appreciate anything my parents did for me, and I certainly didn’t appreciate the sacrifices made for me by previous generations. When I was a kid, I even refused to wear a Remembrance poppy on the grounds that I thought war was stupid and evil and that all the world’s problems could be solved by open discussion and maybe, I don’t know, not buying oranges or something. That’ll show ‘em, I thought, righteously walking past the South African oranges in the greengrocer’s shop, feeling like Nelson Mandela (if Nelson Mandela had a pair of crimping irons and a poster of Morrissey on his bedroom wall.)

For some reason, no one older and wiser than me ever grabbed me by the collar and said something like, listen, you tiny fool, do you really think Hitler would have been persuaded to give up his genocidal campaign if we’d all stopped buying bottles of Blue Nun in the offy? How long do you think your freedom to have “open discussion” would last without all the people who fought and died for your right to open your idiotic gob and discuss stupid crap like that in the first place?

(Incidentally, this hypothetical dressing-down is delivered by a grizzled American who is a cross between Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men and Kurt Vonnegut in a bathrobe. We’re in a log cabin in the middle of some woods and Kurt Nicholson/Jack Vonnegut is actually my estranged father, whom I’ve never been able to connect with emotionally because of his PTSD and the fact that he’s always writing novels. But now we’re forced to team up in order to survive the harsh Alaskan(?) winter by selling our woven goods/tragicomic novellas at the Christmas market. Rumours abound that there are elderly Nazis in the forest conducting experiments on the wildlife; my father’s belief in these ridiculous rumours drives a further wedge between us. But subplot! I fall in love with a dog sled driver who helps me to understand my father, who then wins the Nobel Prize for War Poetry, and the movie ends with an epic battle between us and some mutant Nazi bears, followed by the recitation of a moving poem.)

To someone living in a war-torn land or under the boot of some horrific oppression, it must seem like the most obnoxious entitlement to complain about being pressured to wear a poppy to commemorate people who died fighting for your freedom. Then again, I thought I was oppressed because my usual school lunch was a sandwich I had to dig out of the bottom of the chest freezer. I thought standing in an icy playground trying to suck the calories from frozen bread and ox-tongue was one of the worst things that could ever happen to a person. But really, I should have been grateful that there was always (nearly always) at least one crushed and frostbitten triangle of bread in the bottom of the deep freeze, because that meant another day of not having to eat rats or one of my siblings. Life could have been so much worse. It just took me fifty years a little while to come to this perspective.

Maybe the concept of remembering becomes more important with age. Kids don’t value remembrance, because they have nothing much to remember. When you’re thirteen, you’re not typically looking back and wondering where the years have gone. You’re looking ahead to a time when you can change the world with your brilliant ideas about not having wars and just having honest chats instead. By contrast, once you get to the age of about fifty, you spend most of your time thinking about Spangles and telephone boxes, and being grateful that there was no tiktok around in your youth so that all the times you made angry speeches about how the world’s problems could be easily solved if we all just, like, [mumblemumblesomethingoranges] are entirely lost to posterity.

I appreciate war a lot more these days. The second world war in particular worked out pretty well for me personally. If we hadn’t bothered with that one, I’m almost certain my life would have been a lot less fun. Even if you’d swapped out the frozen sandwiches for schnitzel and dumplings, it probably wouldn’t have made up for the, oh I don’t know, horror and enslavement? Although, to be fair, dumplings are pretty damn tasty.

Of course, no one wants to be involved in a war, even if it does make for more interesting memoirs. At least when my dad dies, I won’t have to read about him being stuck in a freezing, rat-infested trench, chewing his own arm off and using it as a weapon with which to fight the Germans. No, I think it’s going to be a lot worse than that. I’m sorry to say this about my own father’s memoirs, but I’m pretty sure there’s going to be poetry about secret gay sex. And I blame the Nazis for that.

We shall remember them sandwiches