Further memories

Yesterday while we were at the Pub we were joined by a couple who lived in the same part of Manchester that I grew up in. We reminisced & mentioned shops etc that had changed over the years. They had moved there in the 1960s & were surprised to find someone here who remembered it in those days.

Memories were further prompted by watching " Words of the Blitz" on ITV1 last night.

We were both born in the 1950s. Our earliest memories involved the sight of the rubble of bomb-damaged buildings. I remember going into Manchester (we lived on the outer edge of the city, then a fairly rural area) on the bus. We passed vast areas of rubble. Throughout the 50s & 60s there was a huge clearing & re-building programme. Even when I left home in 1972 for university there were still areas where the rubble had been cleared but which remained a wasteland.

Considering all this, it's hardly surprising so much of our cities today are modern. Indeed it's more surprising so many old buildings have survived. And this applies throughout Europe.

It also made me realise how long the after a war the effects of war last. Earlier, in the summer, an unexploded bomb from the World War Two was found just outside a school playground here in Morecambe. Presumably it was dropped on the way to or from bombing the docks at Barrow, the other side of the Bay. And this is 70 years after the blitz.

I can't help wondering when countries such as Korea,Vietnam, Afghanistan, large chunks of Africa, will once more be really safe. Even if the wars have finished, the bombs & mines remain for some unsuspecting person, or child, to come across, setting them off, & so to be killed or maimed, possibly for life.

War is a terrible thing. In my mind it should never be indulged in lightly. I can justify the defensive need to have fought in the last World War or, for that matter, in the Falklands, but it should always be the last resort & as a defensive measure. No matter how New York or London were bombed, I still cannot see the justification for the use of fighting in Iraq & Afghanistan. Words should have been the first weapon, not the gun.