The scene on Scraggy Hill, captured by the 10th Gurkhas during the Battle of Imphal (Wikimedia)
This weekend I attended a VJ Day memorial service in a small town called Bromsgrove in Worcestershire. My grandmother lived in Bromsgrove, and as she died earlier this year I was returning home in memory of her as much as in memory of my grandfather, who served in Burma during the Second World War. The service was held at the Bromsgrove Burma Campaign Memorial, a dignified red brick installation with an air of the early 80s about it. It was my job to lay the remembrance offering for the ‘Ladies’ of the Burma Star Association, an organisation that for both my grandparents offered a great deal of material, social and emotional support over the years.
But what struck me while watching the service and waiting to take my part in it, was the difficulty – but the necessity - of trying to hold so many distant phenomena together on the same plane. Or rather, that the service revealed so many uncomfortable proximities, that the effect was for me deeply unsettling. Watching the elderly men navigate the monument, watched in turn by women with walking sticks hooked over the backs of their chairs, I wondered what it meant to look back from my generation - the grandchildren’s generation?
