AN ANGEL HAS NO MEMORY
By Cliff Reed
Back in 1968 my then girlfriend and I went to see a film called ‘Babarella’. I don’t suppose you could call it a great film by any stretch of the imagination, but it was an entertaining sex and science-fiction comedy that has since attained cult status. Its star was a young Jane Fonda, who I don’t think looks back on it with much pride or affection! Why mention it on Remembrance Sunday? Because of Jane Fonda’s later high-profile opposition to the Vietnam War, perhaps? But no. I mention it because of one stray line in the film that, for some reason, has always stayed with me. It is this: “An angel has no memory.”
The line is spoken by an angel who has been imprisoned and blinded but who, at the end of the film, rescues both Barbarella and the evil queen who had blinded and tortured him. Barbarella asks him, “Why did you save her, after all the terrible things she did to you?” But the angel simply replies with those words, “An angel has no memory.”
It occurred to me how much of the world’s war and conflict might be avoided if, like the angel, people had no memory; if all those past wrongs – real and imagined – which feed the inherited hatred and thirst for vengeance, were to be simply forgotten. But they can’t be. Human beings are not angels! We do have memory and all too often our memory includes things that have scarred us too deeply to be simply forgotten. We remember, but the question is, what do we do with that remembrance?
On Remembrance Sunday we hold in our thoughts the dead of two world wars, and the dead of the all too many wars there have been since. But why do we do it? Of course, if we knew one or more of them personally, then the memory is about that personal loss and sorrow, but in the case of the First World War and increasingly of the Second, people with such personal memories have themselves now died. For most of us our remembrance is not personal, and yet we still hold services and ceremonies like this. We still wear our poppies. We still stand in solemn silence. We still ‘remember’ what most of us do not and cannot remember.
What we focus on is what we have learned, read or been told of those wars. Those poems about the filth and the mud and the slaughter of ‘Flanders field’. Those films – both factual and fictional – of Dunkirk and D-Day. The horrific images of the Nazi death camps and of Hiroshima. The innumerable books that have turned wars into history. Those words and images are often very powerful and meditation on them can help us to resolve that such things should never happen again. But, of course, they have happened. They are happening now, and stopping them seems to be as impossible as ever. Memory, often passed from one generation to the next, can simply be a channel for more bitterness, more hatred, more war. In such cases, the world would be a better place if, like angels, people had no memory.
But a funny thing can happen to remembrance. In the immediate aftermath of war, when its wounds – physical and emotional, mental and spiritual – are fresh, remembrance will be mingled with all manner of resentment and bitterness. At such times talk of reconciliation and friendship with former enemies will be much resented and it will take courage to advocate them. But as time passes and new generations arise without those personal scars, then remembrance can transform into a genuine sorrow at past suffering combined with the will for peace. We hold no enmity now for peoples who our recent forbears looked on with hostility. To us war seems alien, an anomaly in this 21st century. And when war does impinge on our consciousness, as it has most recently in Ukraine and in Israel and Palestine, it seems to us an unnatural violation of the supposedly peaceful ‘post-war’ world we liked to think we lived in. But, as we have seen, the old evils are still at work, breeding cruelty and terrible violence, death and apocalyptic destruction. Human hearts corrupted by inhuman ideologies, by cultivated hatred and by that old-fashioned lust for power continue to undermine the hope of a world at peace, a world able to face together the other threats to our shared future.
Remembrance, then, as we mark it today, has nothing to do with military triumphalism or hostility towards our country’s former enemies. Our red poppies are just as much peace poppies as white ones. But maybe it hasn’t always been so. Between the First and Second World Wars there was a sense of deep revulsion and profound sorrow at the death and horror and senseless slaughter of those four terrible years. It led to the rise of a peace movement and of pacifist beliefs, but these clashed both with the old patriotism and with the wish to see some justification for all the bloodshed and sacrifice. And it also came to clash with something else.
I knew a man who like few I have ever known represented the spirit most appropriate on Remembrance Sunday. His name was Dudley Cave and, in the early 1970s, we were members together at a Unitarian church in London. In the 1930s, as a young man, Dudley shared the pacifist leanings of many of his generation but something happened which changed the situation without changing his strongly-held principles. That was the rise of Hitler and the outbreak of the Second World War. As he put it himself, “I was basically a pacifist, but I thought the Nazi persecution of the Jews made it a just war.”
Aged 20, Dudley enlisted in the Royal Army Ordinance Corps in 1941, but instead of fighting Nazis in Europe he found himself posted to the Far East. When Singapore fell to the Japanese in 1942, Dudley became one of the thousands of Allied prisoners of war. He was one of those sent to work – effectively, as a slave – on the notorious Burma Railway. Of his particular unit, three-quarters were to die there. But Dudley survived. Incapacitated by malaria and deemed ‘unproductive’, he was transferred to Changi prison in Singapore, from which – sick and severely malnourished – he was liberated in 1945.
Among former POWs of the Japanese there was, understandably, deep resentment at the way they had been treated. And Dudley understood those feelings as much as anyone. But while they could have made him bitter, filled with hate against his former captors, Dudley took another path. It was not that Dudley, like the angel, had no memory. Rather he took that painful memory and transformed it. As he put it himself, “I will never forget what the Japanese did to us, but the time has come for forgiveness.”
Dudley promoted peace and rapprochement with Japan, befriended one of his former guards, and became personally involved with the Peace Temple on the River Kwai. In later years, when I got to know him, he had become a prominent champion of gay rights, although it had been in Changi that he had come to terms with his own sexuality. After the war he challenged the negative attitudes to gay people in the services, criticised the Royal British Legion’s refusal to acknowledge their contribution in the fight for freedom, and – in the year before his death – laid a wreath bearing a pink triangle at the Cenotaph. The pink triangle had been the badge which the Nazis made homosexuals wear in the concentration camps, as Jews were made to wear a yellow Star of David, a reminder of why Dudley became a soldier in the first place.
We cannot eradicate memory, nor would we really want to. But we can choose what to do with it. In our Remembrance of the war dead we express our sorrow at lives cut short, we give thanks for what they achieved in defending freedom and resisting tyranny, and we acknowledge with regret the death and suffering on all sides that war did and does involve. We believe that the Divine will is for peace, even though we flawed human beings have yet to achieve it in our troubled world. But there are people – human beings, not angels – who have moulded peace with justice out of painful memories and we give thanks for them.