The beginning of the end is surely in sight

MAYBE I’m grasping at straws but I take relief and hope in what I interpret as good news. Are casualties really diminishing? I choose to believe it despite the harrowing tallies posted daily in the papers.

Authority would surely not feed us duff news to keep up the nation’s pecker.

And to top all that there’s the vaccine, the great hope, the solution to the riddle which plagues the world. But why are there vaccine deniers? I shall not be among them.

Do we really look forward to a horizon devoid of shops – and pubs? Will businesses simply succumb never to reappear? Surely not. Truth is that when the all-clear sounds as it did at the end of the war, when we all emerge from our bomb shelters, when we put away our gas masks, when ration books become museum exhibits, we shall hasten to re-establish life as it was – and with gratitude.

And this can’t be far off if, as we did between 1939 and 1945, we toe the line and use the blackout as we were instructed. Thoughtful people, and I am thankful to live in a district where they thrive, think of others and the common good and some remember those six years of war when death rained down at random.

The coming months I choose to believe are the final push, the defiance with which we began in March. Wars and natural catastrophes like, for instance, earthquakes, often have some dreadful finale, some reminder that all is not quite yet over.

One day towards the end of the war and when my mother and I had left my grandparents’ home where we had spent the war years, we had returned to our real home in Lansdowne Avenue and the two of us were standing on the threshold looking straight down Connaught Avenue.

It could have been the last view we ever had for a fighter plane at little more than rooftop level was flying directly towards us.

It was almost at the end of the war and air raids were extremely rare. Mother and I waved to the pilot as it approached – but when we saw the swastika on the tailplane we ran inside and hid. It did not fire. But it seemed a last gesture. Meanwhile we look out of the window.

The blackbirds here, having eaten the windfalls and bared the elders, have stripped my pyracantha of its crop and started on the holly.

In the azure blue, airliners once again begin their long journeys and leaving vapour trails, and also once again I imagine their passengers going about their normal businesses.

Last week I saw an owl fly across the garden in broad daylight. Life goes on. It’s the last lap.