Sermon for King’s College Chapel, 13 November 2011 Remembrance Sunday Sermon Dr Francis Warner Emeritus Fellow, St Peter’s College, Oxford On 6 February 1945, Winston Churchill, aged 70, went to his desk and wrote: ‘Tonight the sun goes down on more suffering than ever before in the world.’ For over five years he had guided us through the Second World War, and sustained our morale. This simple sentence of his realization carries unimaginable grief. By 1945 this country had given its all. We had his courage to sustain us, but little else. Ingenuity was our chief weapon, stoicism our way of life. David Isitt, undergraduate, Kingsman, and also Chaplain here after the war, tells us that: ‘Coal was rationed, so was bread and butter and jam and meat and clothes and milk and eggs and cheese and tea, so there wasn’t very much to eat. Your coal ration might heat your room for two evenings a week. For the rest, we crowded into the Ronald Balfour Reading Room where there was a gas fire, and we read for the Tripos, smoked our pipes, and smelled rather bad in our unwashed clothes. It was wonderful, and I loved it.’ On 11 October 1940 Boris Ord, the choirmaster here, and later my mentor, conducted Stanford’s ‘Songs of the Fleet’, with Henry Chadwick accompanying at the piano. Sirens went off during the performance warning of enemy aircraft overhead. The sirens were ignored. Boris had been a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War, and was twice wounded, the second time seriously. After this concert he left King’s to join the RAF as a Flight Lieutenant, and was to fight from 1941‐5, not least through the Normandy landings and ensuing campaign. He was not going to have this concert spoilt. On Cambridge 118 high explosive bombs, 3 oil bombs, and over 1,000 incendiary bombs were dropped. In July 1942 alone, the Round Church, the Union Society buildings, and houses in Jesus Lane were bombed. A German Dornier 217 bomber was shot down, landing in Warren Road. But before the serious air‐raids began, these magnificent stained glass windows had been taken down and dismantled, to be hidden from reach of explosives; which is how we still have them today. In their place were huge black canvas screens which flapped loudly in the wind. Wooden panelling continued round right up to the altar, behind which stood three desolate empty wooden niches, before completing the circuit back to these stalls on the other side. However, you could not always see this because the winter fog was so thick — this was before the clean air act — so thick that you couldn’t see from one side of the chapel to the other. Fingers were numb. The Chapel was dark, and dirty with grime and old smoke. There was no heating, no electric light — the only electricity was saved for blowing the organ —and the cold fog seeped in everywhere, circling the choir’s spluttering candles. The Battle of Britain lasted from early July to the end of October, 1940. Throughout that astonishingly beautiful summer and autumn the Royal Air Force and the Nazi Luftwaffe could be seen by everyone, spiralling above us killing each other. Overlapping these dates, from 7 September began the night Blitz, concentrated on London for fifty‐seven consecutive sunsets until all the clear sounded at four or five in the morning. Thereafter frequent heavy bombing continued until May 1941, and intermittently until around 8 May 1945 when a V2 rocket hit London’s Smithfield Market killing 110 people. During these five years Britain was at bay, fighting all‐
out war for survival. Epsom, where my father was the Vicar, was the first and last target of the enemy raiders coming across the Channel for London. As a result I and my brothers and sister experienced the Blitz at first hand. It shaped our childhood: indeed my younger brother was born under the dining room table while we sheltered below in the cellar during one of the heaviest raids of the war — 27 September 1940. The main target was Epsom’s railway junction, which fed Clapham, Victoria and Waterloo stations. In our four square miles over twelve thousand homes, including our first and second Vicarages, suffered. When we were bombed out we slept in the Parish Church. Schools were a particular target. During my first term at school, Petworth Boys’ School to the south‐west on the flight path over us was destroyed in a daylight raid, killing the Headmaster and 31 others, boys and staff. A stick of eight bombs causing devastation just missed Epsom Convent School, but in my second term, on 20 January 1943, Sandhurst Road School, Catford, twelve miles north‐east on the same enemy flight path, was machine‐gunned and bombed leaving 31 children and 6 members of staff dead on the playground. Seven children died later in hospital. Cambridge was more fortunate. On 15 January 1941 several incendiary bombs were dropped on the Perse Boys’ School, but to the best of my knowledge no one was killed. Why am I sharing this with you? Because I am of the final generation that 70 years ago survived the Nazi bombardment of Britain, one of the lucky children who —in the middle of it — survived the Blitz, the rockets, being bombed out twice; who had to duck machine‐gunning on our way to morning school — the Nazi’s favourite time to attack. ‘It will break their morale,’ they said. Those memories are as immediate and clear today as the first glass splinter of bomb blast that cut my shielding hand. But memory is not enough. It is what you do with your memories that matters. Last week I was talking to Mrs Molly Linn, who was at Sandhurst Road School, Catford on 20 January 1943. We were reminiscing, and I asked her if she had any thoughts I could pass on to you today. This is what she said. ‘We’d made a shepherd’s pie in cookery class that morning, but I was too excited to eat because we were going to the theatre to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It had been my birthday 11 days earlier, and I had a new coat in royal blue, which made me feel so grown up. The siren went. I thought ‘I’d better get my purse and gloves from my desk to take to the shelter’, and walked across the classroom. I saw children hanging out of the window, as Betty, the head girl, was telling us to get to the shelter. As she spoke, I looked out of the window and saw a plane. A girl, a seven‐year‐old, in the playground waved assuming the swooping plane was an RAF bomber. The pilot was wearing a leather helmet and goggles, but it didn’t occur to me that he was German. His mouth was drawn back and for a few seconds I thought he was grinning. . . I saw him reach forward and do something to the controls. . . The next thing I knew, I was buried. Betty, who had been standing by me, was killed. I was eventually rescued and taken to Lewisham Hospital. I remember my clothes being cut away, which upset me. I thought, “It’s a new coat. What are my parents going to say?”’ Molly had two crushed and broken arms, and two legs so mangled that they had to be amputated. ‘The Queen came to visit. She brought bananas, and said someone had brought them from Casablanca for the Princesses, but they wanted us to have them instead. We thought you ate them with their skins on, but she showed us you didn’t.’ The Head Mistress came to see me and said ‘That was a nasty day, wasn’t it.’ Astonishingly Molly still lives in Catford. Her memories reveal no hatred. She has used them to be the source of energy to build a life without legs, to marry, have a job, retire, become a widow, and now help in a hospice — and, as she says, ‘not make a fuss’. The Psalmist sings of those ‘who going through the vale of misery use it for a well: and [find] the pools are filled with water. They will go from strength to strength.’ (Psalm 84 vv 6 & 7) Molly Linn is one of them. As Aeschylus put it 2,500 years ago: ‘Man must suffer to be wise’ ‘. . . when time has waited long There grows from the root of wrong The flower of suffering.’ Choephori There are people in this congregation, perhaps many here this morning, who have lost loved ones; some of them in war: who have known suffering. To you I speak. Memory, however sacred, is not enough. Christian remembrance is about the transformation of suffering. It is not static, but dynamic. In the heart of despair, indeed from the very depth of the sorrow, we can find the strength to turn the emotion round, to recreate life. War dismembers, as it dismembered Molly’s twelve‐year‐old limbs. This day in Chapel we re‐member, we put together from memories, realize in our own personalities the fact that we are still alive, to bear witness, celebrate the good in those lost but loved lives, to tell their story and in so doing pass on the hope, the Christian hope, that all can, by grace and a supreme effort of will, be re‐deemed, re‐
thought, by those disfigured limbs crucified on Calvary, the remembrance of which has given us the faith that built, and sustains, this glorious chapel, its music, its art, its windows bringing in this cascade of light, the light of hope, now in the present, and for the future; and of our love for those gone, for our children, and friends, even, finally, our enemies, being the life‐force of God that will, if we let it, create a better world.