I remember it well…and I’m sad

Europe becomes ELSEWHERE–“over there” again, at midnight, as the UK ups anchor and sails away (or free falls from a ship in the sky!)

[image error]I was born in January 1942, so for two and half years I lived in a Europe torn apart by war,  blissfully unaware of the horrors that were happening.

I was lucky. “Elsewhere” featured strongly in my life in the 1950s. My parents were outward-looking and liked to travel, using Dad’s concessionary travel permits (a perk as an employee of British Rail). I took it in my stride; never felt scared of the idea.

My first trip in 1951 was to Paris with a school party.

We traipsed through the streets in crocodile file–two abreast.

Blissfully ignorant of what being occupied had meant for people we were passing on the pavements.

My recall is minimal but I do remember the hot chocolate in cafés and the scary view from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Two years later (summer of 1953),  on our way to a beach holiday in Lloret del Mar on the Costa Brava, I remember feeling shocked seeing young boys begging on the street in Barcelona, just fourteen years after the end of the Spanish Civil War,

I remember Franco’s sinister police with their winged black helmets and machine guns keeping the beach “decent”.

I discovered the taste of an egg fried in olive oil, too.

I remember my first trip to Germany–1957–twelve years after the end of the war.  I took the train to Flensburg near the Danish border and had my wallet stolen.

I remember the generosity of my German host family, who replaced the precious money I’d lost.

I remember in Spring 1961, on a nine-week tour of Europe before University, bashing steel for a week in a factory in Dusseldorf to make connecting rings for pipes and being astonished how quickly the city had risen from the ashes–just sixteen years after the end of the war.

I remember in 1961--(twelve years after the end of the Greek Civil War)–picking mulberries from the tree at a corner of the road leading into Delphi and feeling guilty, trying to wipe the purple stain of mulberry juice from my arms.

That same year, The National Youth Theatre toured Genoa, Florence, Perugia and Rome with a modern-dress production of Julius Caesar (I played a shouty First Citizen). In Rome,  Caesar dressed in a garish uniform may have been an uncomfortable sight for some in the audience. One performance finished at 2am. The producer had run out of money and refused to pay the electricians, who went on strike in the interval. None of the audience left. This was definitely “elsewhere,” we learned that night.

I remember my mother beside herself with worry that brother Jack (six-years-old) was drowning on the beach at Marina di Campo on Elba in summer 1961–146 years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars!!

“There is a world elsewhere”, I pronounced as a defiant Coriolanus–banished from Rome. A college production this time on a tour of Norway, Denmark and Germany.

By now I knew there was and I thrived on exploring it.

I was lucky.

All these early remembrances of times past and many more in the years that followed –experienced in the war-free zone of newly uniting/united Western Europe.

Increasingly and quickly, war became inconceivable within the EU–and has remained so.

Unlike the twenty years after the end of the Great War, a stabilising and unifying  organisation had emerged from the rubble.

And let’s not forget what erupted on the doorstep of the European Union in former Yugoslavia in the mid-nineties.

It was brutal, it was tribal. Neighbour killing neighbour.

A genocide in Srebrenica–8000 men and boys, massacred.

Observer columnist Andrew Rawnsley last Sunday:

There was something precious about the ideal, however imperfectly practised, of the countries of what had been the world’s most murderous continent working together across borders for the prosperity and security of their peoples.

Now Foolish Albion is sailing away, jumping out.

That is why I’m sad or if I’m honest–mad as hell.