The sun shone in a gauzy sky, the breeze blowing steadily over the water, sending white-tipped waves frothing into the shingle. In the foam, oystercatchers fussed over broken shells with their tangerine bills, announcing their finds to one another with a shrill pip! pip!. And as the beach curved slowly northwards, the birdsong danced with the dust of Scots pine and the relics of the past came into view. The rotting bones of war.
This beach was used in Operation Overlord, launched on D-Day in June 1944. It was where ships were loaded with troops and supplies, before setting off into the Channel. Much of the infrastructure lingers: the pierheads’ battered wooden frames still stand in the water, now the windswept perch of a black-headed gull. Concrete slipways slope into the sea. I was even walking on history: enormous slabs of crumbling white concrete that were laid down to stabilise the beach beneath the weight of vehicles.
I sat on the edge of the old road overhanging the beach, legs dangling. We should all make time to sit by the sea. There comes a clarity of mind that only vast, open water can offer.
‘Morning!’ came a woman’s voice. I looked up. It was the afternoon, but you usually say ‘morning’ when out on a walk. She was beaming at me from behind her sunglasses, a springer spaniel sniffing behind her. ‘How are you, my dear? Everything okay?’
The other thing with sitting by the sea alone is that passers-by think you might be contemplating the worst. I laughed and told her that I was just a burnt-out city-dweller who had come to taste oxygen.
The truth is that I was wading through my memories, back at the beach as a child — beaches like that one, strung along the south coast in sand and shingle, where you might see France if you really, really squinted on a really, really clear day as you stepped out into the shallows in your jelly shoes. How many other ankles had felt the same teal, milky ocean lapping around them? It was still there, cold and familiar, rolling into the shore with a hiss as it had done twenty-five years ago. Gulls still rode the swell like white paper boats, while beyond them sailed the distant shapes of real boats: laden barges, bound for other horizons.
The idea of time and memory has been on my mind a lot lately, evidenced in my recent post. And so, as I sat at the frontier of land and water, pocked with the vestiges of war, I saw it as a borderland between the present and the past. I thought about those men on the beach all those years ago, and the people they left at home, waiting nervously by the wireless in an event only a dwindling few can remember today.
Rather guiltily I rarely think about the gravity of the Second World War, of what was at stake, both at a national and human level. Perhaps because the present feels so claustrophobic, so full of amnesia. As events dissolve into time’s mists, their meaning fades, too. We are not encouraged to look at the past and truly think about it; in a politically charged time, popular discussion of history feels, sadly, not born of a genuine interest or a desire to seek lessons from the past, but as a weapon. History can become a gun to hold in people’s faces, forcing them to choose between the ‘right’ or the ‘wrong’ side. A kind of ‘You must agree with me… or else.’
But history is not as simple as a straight line, with everyone on one side or the other. Really, history is a subjective look at objective facts. Events happened, or did not happen, and successive generations then assess those events and ascribe morality to them, shaped by the personal, social and cultural values of the day. We have no way of knowing what those values will be.
Of course, we can say what we think will be the case, which is usually remarkably unimaginative: a loose continuation of the present, perhaps, where people are largely the same as us, with similar values and views, only with slightly more hunched spines from centuries of mobile phone use. But why should this be true?
Let us imagine that the year is 2224. An author — yes, they still exist, somehow — has written a series of novels set in 1690s Vienna and it catches on. Big time. It spawns spin-offs, films, merchandise, a Baroque theme park. Baroque architecture sees a sudden revival: all new buildings are full of frescoes and vaulted copulas. That style of architecture becomes so revered by the people of the future that they begin to look at history through a Baroque prism. The most important thing when looking at the past becomes whether people did enough to preserve and promote Baroque culture.
There is nothing to guarantee the people of the future will look kindly on the Allied soldiers — or indeed us. History is a roll of the dice, both in what happens and how it is viewed
And they are not generous. Grand Victorian railway stations, banks and museums are bulldozed to make way for new, faux-Baroque equivalents (they arrogantly call it ‘Enhanced Modern Baroque’). International aid is stopped and replaced by the Baroque Relief Fund, which finances Baroque restorations around Europe. Streets named after people are renamed for a Baroque architect, artist or musician, or figures who made efforts to preserve Baroque architecture over the centuries. Because they are the real luminaries; anyone from the late 18th century onwards, including Dickens and Darwin, is generally considered a close-minded, ignorant Philistine who prioritised trivial things, and their contributions to science, politics and the arts are dismissed.
Nobody really thinks of the Second World War anymore either, no more than you think about the English Civil Wars, but it is seen principally as an architectural war, in which beautiful cities — most infamously, Dresden — were all but razed to the ground. Those who both perpetrated such an attack and those who let it happen are not heroes in the face of fascism, but villains. Fascism is fine if it is done beneath a stuccoed ceiling. And the worst thing? We will not be there to convince them otherwise.
It sounds fanciful, but there is nothing to guarantee the people of the future should or will look kindly on the Allied soldiers, or indeed us. History is a roll of the dice, both in what happens and how it is viewed. If it is anything to go by, then the people of the future will identify with us no more than we identify with the characters of yesterday. It is worth remembering that nobody has ever considered themselves to be on the wrong side of history — even the darkest, most depraved dictators believed what they were doing was just
Nobody has a full view of history; they cannot live through the events and then shape the future assessment of their role in them. Unless presented with proof in a crystal ball, I am increasingly suspicious of people who insist they are on the right side of history and invite me or anyone else to join them.
Instead, our efforts are best focused on what we do now. More valuable to the world are our contributions to the people and places around us, and not a preoccupation for what our great-great-great grandchildren might think. If the Baroque-heads of 2224 look kindly on me for whatever I did, then so be it — that is, of course, in the extremely unlikely event that they see me at all.
On my walk back along the shore, I passed a memorial stone, stolid against the wind, commemorating the men who liberated Normandy:
Take these men for your example.
Like them remember that prosperity can only be for the free,
that freedom is the sure possession alone who have the courage to defend it.
As the beach crunched beneath my feet, much was still the same: the black-headed gull on his perch, the oystercatchers, the reassuring melody of the tide. But I thought of those men at this spot eighty years ago, full of fear and hope, their hearts aching as much as their arms as they hauled supplies onto ships. They did what was needed in the moment, knowing that everything was at the whims of destiny.
The gulls wailed, and the sun was still shining. I told you what happens when you sit in front of vast, open water.