Vikram Seth chose, as the one of his Desert Island Discs that he would save from the waves, a BBC sound recording from 1942. Intended to capture just the sound of nightingales, it also picked up the sound of Lancaster bombers on their way to raid Mannheim.
It is hard to describe the effect of this juxtaposition – both pleasure & disbelief – plus, for me & I guess for others of my age, intense feelings of childhood nostalgia. Listening leaves one transfixed, almost forgetting to breathe.
We were just too young to have memories of the war but we grew up when it was normal to walk down unlit streets or to be driven along rural roads where headlights provided the only illumination on moonless nights; we were told lots of stories about the blackout & we saw all those 1950s war films at a very impressionable age. We knew that the sound of bombers was scary, but these sound almost as if they were themselves part of nature.
Coincidentally BBC tv is broadcasting a 2-part filmed adaptation of Sebastian Faulk’s Birdsong – a novel about the First World War.
I have never read this book; by the time it came out in 1993 I felt I had had enough of such futility & emotion.
I once had the privilege of being lent a copy of a privately published ‘life’ of the great uncle of a friend; he had recently died, full of years, & this was his widow’s way of keeping his memory alive.
He had gone to Flanders as a subaltern straight from school. His diary described his experiences, including one passage which gave an account of how he had had to walk over newly-dead bodies packed deeply in the trench from which they had been fighting.
I was just thirty at the time & I just sat there thinking: He was seventeen years old.
That was enough; don’t need to keep being told.
