Winds and Breezes

Amongst the books

In one of the Terry Pratchett books, I do not remember which one, Lord Vetinari says to Sam Vimes that what people really want is for tomorrow to be the same as today, and for the day after to be the same. What they want is stability.

It's been a source of some thought and reflection to me lately.

Additionally, two years ago, when I did a September driving trip to Brittany, I stayed in a village called Ste Marie de Menez Hom. Menez Hom is the highest hill in Brittany - if I'm not mistaken I think it's somewhere in the region of 330m high. There are fantastic views there and I took some arresting pictures of a sunset while it was oh so freezing cold.

The village is fairly tiny, consisting as it does of a church, a chambre d'hote and a paragliding school. It's a fairly popular area for hiking as well. One evening before I left to come back to Ireland, I took a look inside the small church - it's exquisite. I didn't take any photographs because it was dark and I never feel very happy about using flash in fragile looking buildings. On one of the walls at the back of the church, there is a plaque commemorating the fact that a number of airmen were hidden in the church before being taken out of France by boat. I'm afraid I forget the details now.

Some time ago, I acquired a book of Robert Doisneau photography. Robert Doisneau stayed in Paris during World War 2, and the book includes some of the photographs he took at that time. I think, although I haven't yet managed to acquire it, there is a book dedicated to those pictures.

One of the things which struck both in that church, and looking at photographs of German soldiers marching in the rue de Rivoli in Paris, was that I could not conceive how people could have lived through that time. I decided to do some reading in that area of history, and to that end, I recently read the memoirs of a member of the Resistant in Brittany, and I currently have a book out on the subject of living in France from 1940 to 1944. It really was a lot more complicated than I realised, seeing as the country was split up into six zones.

I can't, from the vantage of my life in the early 21st century, envisage how people managed to get on with life in the middle of a war. I know they did, and I know that were it to happen again, we would. Because in the end, that's the first thing you have to do.

The descriptions about life in Brittany - from the book by the Resistance fighter - it really rams home to me what an alien place history can be. I can't, from this point in time really conceive just how recent it all was, even though my mother talks about the day that bananas arrived in the shops for the first time after the Emergency from experience, not from a story passed down through the family. I sometimes think that we forget it was really a very, very short time ago.

posted by Winds and Breezes @ 3:37 PM