Stoic and sensible, will we ever meet Dame Vera’s like again?
IF ever there was an event which summed up the nightmare that is 2020 (I don’t know about you, but I’d like a refund) it was the death this week of Dame Vera Lynn at the age of 103.
The Forces’ Sweetheart, who once again caught the mood of the nation as her most famous song got us through lonely days of lockdown, felt like a touchstone. a reminder of our last great crisis, and our ability to grit our teeth and get on with it.
She was simultaneously a beacon of joy, restraint and determination. To lose her now, at a time when we are losing so many members of her generation to this pandemic, feels acutely sad.
It is perhaps unsurprising to learn that, right until the end, Dame Vera was still signing photographs and meticulously checking letters written on her behalf before they were sent off.
She had even penned a new song. not bad for 103.
But then again, this was a woman who celebrated VE Day not with tears and hysterics, but with a cup of tea and a small glass of sherry. She embodied a certain type of Briton – stolid and stoic, sensible yet sentimental – and a brand of nationhood that is rapidly being consigned to the history books.
We’ll meet again goes the old song, but will we? Will we really meet the likes of Dame Vera again?
Or Our grandparents, say, who lived through one, perhaps two world wars, and made it to the other side? What is to become of the values of those war generations, of those who embodied the Blitz spirit, who made do and mend, who got on with things no matter what?
Because there is little doubt that in these past, dark months, we have failed this generation.
care home deaths in Scotland from covid-19 are now higher than hospital deaths. Why? Because the elderly were flung out of hospital wards, condemned to cruel and painful deaths in care homes too overwhelmed to cope.
It is a stain on our nation and it shows, too, a frightening lack of regard for those we were once taught to respect.
It is a Britain which they themselves, in their younger years, would not have understood.
a place where youthful voices constantly trample over older ones, where the lives of the elderly have fallen woefully low on the priority list as we rush to placate the woke, permanently wounded millennials.
I have been uneasy for a long time about the disdainful way younger generations now seem to view their elders.
It was, for me, embodied in the backlash against older people in the aftermath of the no vote in the 2014 referendum, where idealistic twenty-somethings blamed their parents and grandparents for not voting with them for a fantastical independent la la land of sunshine and unicorns.
Some ghastly things were said, many of them along the lines of: ‘They’ll be dead soon anyway, why did they even bother voting?’ The notion that having lived longer, their elders might, perhaps, understand a little bit more about the world – and may even wish to improve it for those who came next – clearly never having occurred to them.
Similar things were said about the Brexit vote across the UK, and while I was a no voter myself in that particular poll, I completely respect the right of everyone, particularly my elders, to vote however they see fit. after all, haven’t they earned it?
I honestly don’t know when, or how, this shift happened. and yet I see it everywhere.
In the disdain for ‘boomers’ (yes, the word boomers, as in baby boomers, is now a shorthand insult used by those in their teens and twenties, generally meant to suggest that anyone over 50 is out of touch), and in the sneering towards older politicians (experience apparently, counts for nothing these days). I also see it, in the worst possible way, in how our government treated the elderly during this pandemic.
Dame Vera was around long before baby boomers (and may have fuelled the birth of many) and she was the best of us, as so many of her generation were.
The best of what this nation can do when it rallies, pulls together, and acts for the good of us all, not just those under 65.
I am desperately sad for the men and women whose lives have ended in such darkness. Who were condemned to lonely deaths without even their loved ones present, tossed aside like rubbish because their lives no longer counted.
They deserved better. We should have given them better. and we must do everything we can to ensure it never happens again.