InfoBritain

 

Personal Note Archive November 2006

 

4th November 2006

Battle of Britain Memorial

Sometimes everything seems to be alright in the past. In his novel Women In Love D.H. Lawrence has one of his characters sitting in the park of an old mansion thinking: "how lovely, how sure, how formed, how final all the things of the past were - the lovely accomplished past .... And then what a snare and a delusion..." It sometimes seems as if everything in the past is tamed by passing. The end of October, for example marked the end of the Battle of Britain in 1940, and today aircraft in which young men did battle put on weekend displays for the children. And perhaps we should be glad that the fear and uncertainty of those times has been tamed: while at other times you look round at bored children with clipboards and think if only for a moment we could feel what those past times really meant. I recently visited the Battle of Britain Memorial at Capel Le Ferne near Folkestone in Kent, an area where a great deal of intense fighting took place in the skies overhead during the Battle of Britain. There is a visitors' centre, a Spitfire and a Hurricane aircraft, a flag mast which stood at Biggin Hill airfield during the battle, and the memorial itself, which consists of a huge representation of a propeller laid out in the grass, with a statue of a young pilot in the middle looking out to sea. I found walking around the memorial a moving experience. The young pilot is staring out over the sea. He looks reflective and peaceful, as though it's all over now and he can sit back and think about the past. There is also a sense, however, that he is still watching the sky for enemy aircraft. He is in full flight kit, ready to go. If the call came you get the feeling he would jump up and run off to the Spitfire parked outside the visitors' centre where people are having cups of tea. This is a thoughtful memorial, fittingly reflective, and yet with an immediacy, which suggests the atmosphere of those months in the summer of 1940. The memorial confirms that we can trust in a peace that comes afterwards: and yet there is still that feeling that any moment now...