The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Fitting time to honour heroes from battles both old and new
Oh for a crystal ball to show us how they’ll look back on this era come 2095.
Will our descendants be slipping off their jetpacks in order to applaud the 75th anniversary of our great victory over the virus that brought civilisation to an unprecedented but fleeting standstill? Or will this turn out to have been merely the starting point in a much more prolonged and destructive battle for survival?
Will it go down in history as the year everything changed, or just the summer when we cancelled all our plans, vowed to re-emerge as kinder, better citizens with cleaner hands and a newfound respect for other people’s personal space, then all went back to living our lives as imperfectly as we had before?
It would be nice to think that if they are celebrating the heroes of the coronavirus crisis they’ll have the freedom to do so in whichever way they choose and with no more than the usual regard for social distancing, because of all the dates scrubbed out of our 2020 diaries the scaling back of the commemorations for the 75th anniversary of VE Day feels like a particularly cruel cut.
The dwindling band of veterans who are still here to see it are nearing their hundredth birthdays, or have already marched past that milestone, and by the time the next big number rolls around their ranks will be thinner still. Seventy-five years of peace and prosperity, built on the foundations of their sacrifice, is no mean feat and there are few people as deserving of a bit of a fuss as the characters we’ve had the pleasure of profiling this week.
Take Jimmy Sinclair from Kirkcaldy. At 107, the former Desert Rat is the UK’S oldest veteran and one of the stars of a new photo series commissioned by Legion Scotland and Poppy Scotland to mark the anniversary. A planned Edinburgh exhibition was postponed due to lockdown restrictions, so instead the images of Jimmy and comrades were screened to the world as part of a virtual remembrance service, one of a series of long-planned events that had to be hastily shifted online or scrapped altogether.
Scone centenarian George Stewart was another who shared his memories, this time of the Italian campaign as a member of the 78 (Lowland) Field Regiment.
Meanwhile 99 year-old Jane Ewart-evans, of Crieff, reminded us that women played key roles, too – in her case as one of the Bletchley Park code breakers credited with shaving two years off the war.
Their stories have been a humbling retort to the growing murmurs of lockdown fatigue; a reminder we’ve bounced back from darker days than this before, and that ordinary people are capable of extraordinary acts when the occasion calls for it. Today our heroes aren’t young men being sent to fight and die on foreign soil but the carers in our own communities taking their lives in their hands on a daily basis on the home front of this global pandemic. It was a privilege, but one that gave us no pleasure, to tell the stories of three women this week – dementia nurse Karen Hutton from Carnoustie, nurse Johanna Daniels from Dundee, and carer Janet Livingston from Ferryden – who died trying to protect some of the most vulnerable members of society from Covid-19, and I’m sure Jimmy Sinclair and his pals will not have minded sharing the spotlight.
The war has been a reference point for a lot of people during this crisis – the events cancelled for the first time in 75 years, the blitz spirit, the language of fights and battles – so perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise some people are casting around for an enemy.
As Donald Trump tried to shift the blame for his woeful response in the US, where the death toll has passed 75,000, by returning to the discredited conspiracy theory that it originated in a Wuhan lab, we reported on the findings of a study that revealed Chinese people were increasingly becoming the targets of a rising tide of racist abuse.
We saw it here in Courier Country in the early days of the virus in the vandal attacks on Chinese supermarkets and takeaways, and now respondents across the UK are reporting they have been coughed at, attacked and told to “go back home”.
I much preferred the story we covered that day about the consignment of 35,000 face masks sent from China to Perth and Kinross – the fruits of long-standing friendships built up between two communities thousands of miles apart, and a symbol of how everyone benefits when we all pull together.
The common thread that links every war veteran I’ve been lucky enough to interview over many years has been the absence of desire to ever go there again, the agreement that life’s too short to go picking fights with folk who just happen to have been born somewhere else, so I’ll leave the last word to Jimmy Sinclair. When asked to reflect on the fight that defined his lifetime, he said: “It’s a pity it happened. We didn’t treat the Germans as enemies… most of them didn’t want to die, either.”