EngAGE Stories

One workday I escaped the late afternoon sun into the popcorn fragrant darkness of the movies. My friends had recommended one in particular but told me nothing more than, “It’s about England, you’re English. You’ll appreciate it!”  I settled into the comfortable seat and surrendered to a story apparently set in a time before I was born.

As the story about a family struggling in the sticky web of the English class system unfolded, the images on the screen changed from lush green meadows to a flat, windswept coast. I recognized with surprise, that I was not now looking at England but at Belgium. My body tensed and I knew that this was Dunkirk even before the camera panned across the desperate, bedraggled soldiers on the beach.

My mind skittered back to my childhood hero.  My father, clever, funny, inventive – and invincible I thought then – had been one of those men. That awful mark on British history had also woven its broad dark thread into English family life, and ours, no less. Barely perceptible, its menacing presence nonetheless threw all the other threads of our lives into sharp relief.

As I watched the scenes of men waiting to die, an insistent refrain in my head protested, “But that isn’t as bad as he described it!” Tears for my father and all the other men who were there, slid down my nose; tears for those who were rescued and those who never went home.

In the dark of the cinema, I remembered walking that beach with Dad years after the war had ended. Only 16, I was, even then, conscious that something he had carried with him all the years of my life was with us, amplified and more real than that sunny day swept bone-white by the ocean wind.

We had all lived with his burden without really knowing what it was. Only the predatory shadow in the sun-dappled stream of our days that exploded violently into nightmares that had him screaming out loud night after night.

In many layered silence we walked, a man and his young daughter. I struggled fruitlessly to understand the profound experience that marked him.  There had been times before when I thought I glimpsed its grim spectre in his pale blue eyes. I had asked him hard questions then, about death and fear and killing people — how? why? — and was given brief, patient answers. I remembered that each time my mother would flee the room, begging me not to ask any more.

That day on the beach, I knew instinctively that we had arrived at a place that he had never completely left.  I remember how hard I tried then to tune in to him on every level that I could, except words. Somehow, I could tell that what he knew was beyond language, and, try as I did to understand, I saw the experience was out of my reach.

We came to the Memorial, its light stones etched with many, many names. I stayed a few steps behind him, watching carefully as he painfully walked its length, in a dream, swimming through the past that lay heavily on the stones. I watched as he was pulled closer to some inscriptions, when familiar names wrapped around him like seaweed around a swimmer’s ankles.

He slowly traced the names, as if touching the stones would return the precious friendships of boys prematurely urged into manhood by war. He sighed as he finally buried men who he had been carrying with him, carefully wrapped in the possibility that they too had managed to get away from the inferno. Hell, he called it; desperate, dying men, screaming animals, explosions, shrapnel slicing scorched flesh; rescue ships sinking in flames, sailors and hope drowning together.

All I could offer him that day was my company; to walk with him, to listen whenever words leaked out of his tight mouth, and as I now understand, to remind him, by my very presence, that there is hope and a future.

We returned to the car where my mother waited fearfully, made inarticulate by her own battle wounds. They were inflicted not on the beach but at home, as planes rained flames onto her neighborhood and workplace and exploded the only life she had known.  She, too, I realized, had her own frightful memories.

I have asked myself since, how can love grow out of that kind of terror and pain? How was it possible for that man and woman to grope towards each other through the all-pervading darkness of war to find romance and love in each other?

After experiences like theirs, how can anything have meaning? How can hope be reborn? How can you trust? Feel compassion? Believe in goodness?

Somehow they did, and millions of others with them.

I only now can appreciate the ordinary miracles of life, when jokes and laughter and affection and tender words happen, where dreams are dreamed.

In spite of everything. In spite of war. Even in spite of war.

Maureen Kellen-Taylor is C.O.O. of EngAGE, Inc.