havemehavana

When I am walking through town at gone eleven one night a man with a heavily-bleeding cut above his left eye stops in my path to grasp my hand and garble a story about the time he was serving in Iraq and clocked a fellow soldier on the back of the head with the butt of his gun to stop said fellow soldier raping a woman who the bleeding man describes to me now as “a Muslim woman”. Possibly there is truth to it. Possibly he tells me because blinking through the drink he sees my dark hair and paisley-swaddled torso. I give him a couple of minutes then make my escape. Later when I wave away a man asking “dywanennyeezorcharleelid” I see my hand the hand the soldier shook is streaked with dried blood.

Have a good night god bless help a homeless guy get a bed. Give us a tenner then. Got no change give us a tenner. I wish the birds would attack then I could pick youse all up as a bird I’d be a bird. God bless thank you have a good night help a homeless guy get a bed.

Preliminary Schedule 
‘Solidarity with the People of Greece’ 
Sat 24th March | Next to Nowhere

· 12 MIDDAY: Flashpoint protest. Meet at social centre 12pm

· 1.30 -Food is served

· 2.45 -Dr Maria Pentaraki talk ‘Dispelling the ideological Myths about Greece and its ‘Crisis’

· 3.30 –‘Debtocracy’ projected

· 4.30 -Talk by Darren Guy on his research into the Greek Resistance Movement in WWII, followed by:

· 5.00 -Performance of work in progress, ‘A Thousand Murdered Girls’

· 5.30 -Projection of ‘Greek Civil war’.

· 6.30 -Talk by Dr Eleni Michalopoulou – ‘Coordinating tactics & strategies with the Greek people’

· 7.15 -Projection of documentary ‘Hidden war’ and/or ‘Exploring Revolt in Greece’

· 8.00 -Skype conference with Greek Activists

· 9.00 -Discussion

· 9.45pm onwards- Music, drinks, leftover food & beyond

There will also be a screening of short films throughout the day by Ross Domoney on the Greek Crisis.

Remembering is good. Understanding is vital.

I don’t watch BBC News much but I just caught the end of a report from a school who sent a lot of pupils to both world wars. A younger student wrote at one point that they were “running out of food and running out of sixth formers” as kids were sent to the front when they turned eighteen. They went off to gutter and choke on gas in a scrabble over land, resources and barely differing ideologies. This is more than sad. It is barbaric. The first world war wasn’t a war, it was a crime perpetrated by states against the people they ruled, a crime against humanity. Since we’re Remembering today, I’d like to mention one of my great grandfathers who was killed in that war, and talk about his family.

  Albert was born in Newcastle to a ship caulker father who had left his native (and occupied) Ireland looking for work. Albert in turn moved to Lancashire and started working for a plasterer whose young daughter would clamber the scaffold every day to bring the workers lunch. Reader, he married that young daughter, Gerty, and got her pregnant, and then promptly went off to war in 1914. Gerty gave birth to Ellen the following year but with a husband away and no welfare you might imagine the struggle. We don’t know when poverty began to bite but at some point during WWI Gerty took a job as a live-in servant: you got your food and your board but you couldn’t keep your child. Ellen was sent to an orphanage. Gerty visited her daughter as often as possible and it was supposed to be temporary but then, a month before the end of the war, Albert was killed in action and my dad’s mum was raised in that orphanage. This was not uncommon. It was one of the prices paid by working people during WWI that you just don’t hear about.

  As it happens, Gerty saw Ellen all the time and when Ellen had children they’d hang out with her at the “posh house” where Gerty was housekeeper, marvelling at stores of fur coats, playing in the orchard and stealing nibbles of homemade Battenberg cake. Gerty lived until she was ninety, forever hating the new fangled “dismal [decimal] money” and worrying that eletricity might drip out of bulb-less ceiling lights. Ellen married a bricky who traveled the country, first rebuilding houses bombed out in WWII, then building new houses for a swelling population, though on the wage of someone rebuilding the country they still couldn’t afford their own. They raised four kids in a council house and the youngest was my dad, a merchant seaman, factory worker, union activist and the first in his family to go to university, full grant of course, with the local government job that followed paying just enough to support a wife in teacher training and three young kids. He’s now retired and writing. His mum Ellen died of cancer, the survival rates of which have shot up thanks to NHS workers.

  You want to talk about sacrifice? Imagine leaving your pregnant partner while you go off to die for a state who won’t support that family. Imagine giving up your child because you can’t afford to keep her. What is happening to the concept and delivery of universal health care? Where are the grants for people who want to go to university? Where are the homes for people who can’t afford them? Why are people who need financial help to care for their families vilified instead of helped? Why are we still sending people to war in fights over land and resources and power, many of whom will leave children behind?

You want to remember? Fine. Let’s also understand the reality of people’s lives, what makes them that way and how to change things for the better. Isn’t that the best way to honour people who make sacrifice?