Every morning, unless someone’s vomited in my path, I walk between two war memorials. One is extremely fancy and timeless: a clocktower of Portland stone, the perfectly typeset names of local residents killed between 1914 and 1919. I sometimes look reflexively for a Williams, then remember that there are always a bunch of us, none related to me: the only notable person in my lineage to die in the first world war was my grandmother’s true love, in grief for whom she married my grandfather, who was a notorious prick.
On the other side is a garish, funny-looking building, squat and round, with a mural in memory of Violette Szabo, the British-French spy who died at the hands of the Nazis in Ravensbruck in 1945, aged 23. There’s a painting of Roger Moore, looking nothing like himself, round the other side. The theme isn’t so much “war heroes” as “people who lived round here and were good”, and the stark contrast in dignity with its neighbouring memorial is in direct inverse proportion to the dignity of the memorialised. Szabo fought fascism of her own volition and, until the final three weeks of her life, was the resistance movement’s constant source of buoyancy and hope. By contrast, most of the Williams upon Wilsons upon Smiths upon Crumplers were called up to fight a war that, meh, let’s just say if the political-military-industrial complex that started it had been contractually required to go over the top first, they might have found another way to resolve their differences.
