Some interesting war memorials and war-related places I’ve been to (2)

As it’s been so sunny this weekend, it got me thinking of warmer climes in which I’ve seen war memorials.  The one that particularly came back to me was the one in Singapore, which I visited about eighteen months ago.

The First World War memorial is on Esplanade Park, which is behind it; perhaps unsurprisingly it’s right next to the Singapore Recreation Club, a colonial hub.  It looks like this:

The cenotaph design seems tweaked at the very top to suggest a south-east Asian influence.  Otherwise, it’s a very recognisably British evocation of the First World War, in what was at the time one of the more remote outposts of the empire.  The memorial was unveiled in 1922, not long after the Whitehall cenotaph itself.  Singapore at that time was markedly less developed than today.  You can see see in the right-hand side background one of the most striking symbols of its recent growth, the Marina Bay Sands complex.

I don’t profess to be an expert on the Second World War, but the memorial to civilian losses in that conflict, as Singapore was occupied by Japanese forces, is spectacular.

The remains of some of the victims are buried underneath the monument, and the four towers speak to the main strands of Singapore’s cultural heritage (Chinese, Eurasian, Indian, Malay).  Even the perspective of this photograph can’t quite do justice to the sheer scale of this memorial, and its incongruity in a busy part of a busy city.

[Alternative title suggestions for this series are still welcomed…]

Imagining the defence of England. Well, some of it.

I’m writing an article at the moment about invasion literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  I’m particularly looking at Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903), but have spent the day looking at George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871) and some of the responses to that.  And there were plenty of responses to it: The Battle off Worthing: Why the Invaders Never Got to Dorking, and What Happened After The Battle of Dorking: Victory at Tunbridge Wells to name but two.

Chesney’s book is a response to the recent Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1.  He imagines an unnamed but obviously Germanic foe taking on the complacent British Army, sweeping through the southeast.  Indeed, the novel and its respondents are focused on London and the surrounding area.  The tacit assumption that underlies all of these works is that if an enemy were to make it past the capital, then it wouldn’t be worth bothering to carry on.

The appearance of troops from the north of England in the novel (well, it’s a novella, really – about 80 pages) is revealing.  They are prisoners of war, and the unnamed protagonist intervenes on their behalf as they are about to be summarily executed:

“Herr Hauptmann,” I cried, as loud as I could, “is this your discipline, to let unarmed prisoners be shot without orders?” The officer, thus appealed to, reined in his horse, and halted the guard till he heard what I had to say. My knowledge of other languages here stood me in good stead, for the prisoners, north-country factory hands apparently, were of course utterly unable to make themselves understood, and did not even know in what they had offended. I therefore interpreted their explanation: they had been left behind while skirmishing near Ditton, in a barn, and coming out of their hiding-place in the midst of a party of the enemy, with their rifles in their hands, the latter thought they were going to fire at them from behind. It was a wonder they were not shot down on the spot. The captain heard the tale, and then told the guard to let them go, and they slunk off at once into a by-road. He was a fine soldier-like man, but nothing could exceed the insolence of his manner, which was perhaps all the greater because it seemed not intentional, but to arise from a sense of immeasurable superiority. Between the lame freiwilliger pleading for his comrades, and the captain of the conquering army, there was, in his view, an infinite gulf. Had the two men been dogs, their fate could not have been decided more contemptuously. They were let go simply because they were not worth keeping as prisoners, and perhaps to kill any living thing without cause went against the hauptmann’s sense of justice.  (George Tomkyns Chesney, The Battle of Dorking, pp. 90-1.)

The protagonist suggests that he needs knowledge of two more languages than his own: that the northern dialect is in effect a separate language, which he has to translate again into German.  It is suggested that they have been doubly cowardly: both for hiding, and for the possibility that they might take the unsporting action of shooting men in the back.  The protagonist suggests that they are explaining away their actions, and the description of them slinking off emphasises the unmilitary bearing of those men.  They are equated with animals and deemed worthless.  The official version of Englishness is at stake here: the protagonist can only conceive a proto-Newbolt honourable playing of the game of war by those who speak the right language and play by the ‘correct’ rules.  The story seems to be about a twofold defence: defending the south, the seat of power, from corruption by the dissolute and dishonourable north, and defending it from invasion from the sea.

This quotation, and the elision of the north of the country from these narratives, attests to the alignment of official narratives of Englishness with the south of the country.  It’s something I’m trying to think more about as I move from thinking primarily about the war to working on literary geographies.  But I’m beginning to think that maybe, following the lead of work that’s already been done on the war and space by people like Mark D. Larabee in his Front Lines of Modernism: Remapping the Great War in British Fiction, that I might be combining the two.

Some interesting war memorials and war-related places I’ve been to (1)

The title for this occasional series might need some work.

Cairn and cross, Helvellyn, summer 2013

 

I spent a few days in Patterdale last summer with my estimable partner in crime, Lisa.  We climbed Helvellyn on one of the hottest days of the year.  (In case you’re wondering, this isn’t advisable.)  We ascended through Grisedale and then up the vertiginous, winding Dollywaggon Pike.

At the top we came across this cross-mounted poppy, looking towards Ullswater.  Remembrance reaches to some unlikely and not-that-easy-to-reach places.

Academics Are People Too

Academics are people too. I’ve been turning over this phrase in my head for a while, in response to the increasing workload I see colleagues shouldering, and the almost exclusive focus which is demanded to achieve an academic career.

Ironically, feeling that I should be doing work instead has got in the way of me starting this blog more times than I can easily count. So, tonight I’m just going to press ‘post’ before I see something shiny and wander off.  Or look too long at the stack of books imploring me to read them.

Intellectual work of any form is subject to Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time available. How many days do you have to mark that pile of exam scripts? That’s how long it will take. When is that conference proposal due? It’ll be sent off late on that day. When is that article due? You know that if you’re around the deadline you will be far from the last to submit. I never fail to be struck by the irony of the elasticity of the majority of academic deadlines in comparison with the hard and fast deadlines the students we teach have to adhere to. Yes, of course, we’ve earned the privilege, and everyone else is in the same over-extended boat. But still.

It’s difficult to work back to when I first started thinking about the need to balance the personal and the professional effectively. Maybe it was in 2008, as I was finishing my PhD having just returned from a three-month interruption to deal with some family stuff. Maybe it was in 2009 as I was teaching a full load for the first time. Maybe it was in 2011, when I ended up needing to finish four articles in the same semester as I was doing three quarters of my teaching. It certainly crystallised as I was trying to finish my monograph in 2012 while jobhunting, and was still there after I finished as I was moving house and institution in 2013.

From my position in 2014, still (too) busy but without a major project on my plate for the first time since I started the PhD, I’m absolutely convinced of the need to keep active outside of academia, both mentally and physically. I wasn’t good at it when doing the above. I wish I’d continued to do some exercise, to get out and about, to reassert the importance of my mental health and physical health as, in the end, vital to my professional health. The uneven demands of work in the university aren’t conducive to maintaining regular activities outside of it. But that makes it even more important to do so. In the humanities we need to remember the importance of being human.

This isn’t just about me, though. I mentioned initially that this is a burden I see others shouldering. I hosted an #ecrchat in 2012 that looked at work-life balance, and found similar stories.

A variety of articles that I’ve linked in previous, unpublished versions of this piece are no longer current, but give a sense of how important an issue this is.  Just to give a flavour, here’s one from the THES which perpetuates problematic stereotypes. The striking thing about these entries is the lack of time in the day to do anything apart from academic work. The limited time Ruth Farwell is able to devote to her beekeeping seems symptomatic of a wider problem, as are the rare dates Alice White is able to manage with her partner. Surely it isn’t right that we should be subjecting ourselves to this sort of unsustainable schedule?

There are, of course, wider issues about the shrinking budgets for Higher Education and the spread of casualisation in the academy that underlie this – from that point of view today, UCU’s Anti-Casualisation day of action, is apposite for this post.

Challenging Zero Hours Academia http://t.co/KofzLQOw64 via @UCUAnti_Cas #AntiCas14

— UCU Anti-Casualisation Committee (@UCUAnti_Cas) May 7, 2014

 

I’ve also been impressed by others on twitter thinking and writing about health and wellbeing. Katie Lowe (@fatgirlphd) is great on being healthy, positive and getting things done; the thing that most recently inspired me to come back to this idea was some of Lucia L.’s tweets (@empathywarrior) about mental health and academia.

Some days I dream of pursuing a dream of doing my degree in counselling psychology and working full-time with academics re: stressors.

— Lucia Lorenzi, PhD (she/they) (@luminousmethods) April 19, 2014

This would be a great service.

 

So, the point of this blog is to remind me, and to remind us, even to remind our students, that academics are people too. It’s OK to have external interests – no, it’s GOOD to have external interests. This blog will be about research and pedagogy. There might even be a bit of shameless self-promotion. But it’ll also be home to music and book reviews, recipes, comments about sport. Anything that comes to mind to write about. I want to demonstrate clearly that it’s possible for two sides of life to coexist in academia, and it’s good to write about all aspects of that life. It’s necessary, even, to write about the good things as well as the moments with which we struggle, to remind ourselves that it’s not one long unremitting tide of papers to write, essays to mark, conferences to attend, exams to mark, jobs to apply for and classes to teach.

Maybe it’s time for a new hobby.  Or time to catch up with those friends you keep thinking you don’t have time to catch up with as you spend another night sitting fretting about that article and not achieving much.  Spending time on yourself to relax is good – it can make you work effectively as much as take time you don’t have, and recharge those batteries in order to let you think clearly about work. Because we do need to be able to think clearly – more than anything, as academics, we need to be able to think clearly. And making space to think clearly comes, in part, from taking up a bit more space with leisure.