Blue Remembered Hills — An elegy for my parents-in-law and the post-war liberal, democratic, rules-based order
Last week, a mile or so from Malvern, atop North Hill, the second-highest point of the Malvern Hills, we scattered the ashes of my father-in-law and mother-in-law, Peter and Peggy Lee. From its summit one can, on a good day, see a goodly part of the three counties (Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, and Worcestershire) where Peter grew up during the 1920s, and which Peter and Peggy later came to know together as adults with a shared love of the high hills of England and Wales.
Both Peter and Peggy served in WWII as members of Special Operations Executive (SOE) which, for those of you who do not know, was formed in 1940 to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in Nazi-occupied Europe. As such, Peter and Peggy played a direct role in helping to create the post-war liberal, democratic, rules-based order that has shaped the lives of every one of us reading this blog.
I’ll return to this point in a moment but, firstly, I want to remind you that the poet most often associated with the Malvern Hills and the Three Counties — and whose work was much loved by Peter and Peggy — is the English classical scholar and poet A. E. Housman (1859–1936). Indeed, these hills are Housman’s “blue remembered hills” immortalised in poem no. 40 found in his famous 1896 collection, “A Shropshire Lad”, and this was the first of two Housman poems that Susanna, Peter and Peggy’s daughter — and also my wife — read atop North Hill:
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
The second poem that Susanna read as we began to scatter Peter and Peggy’s ashes into the strong wind, was Housman’s poem no. 32, also from “A Shropshire Lad,” a poem in which he is at his most Lucretian:
From far, from eve and morning
And yon twelve-winded sky,
The stuff of life to knit me
Blew hither: here am I.
Now—for a breath I tarry
Nor yet disperse apart—
Take my hand quick and tell me,
What have you in your heart.
Speak now, and I will answer;
How shall I help you, say;
Ere to the wind’s twelve quarters
I take my endless way.
Standing on the summit of North Hill, with Peter and Peggy now taking their endless way commingled with the always moving twelve-winded source of all being, all of us present were also acutely aware that Trump’s anger the previous day shown towards Ukraine, Europe and NATO seemed likely to become one of the key moments that would come to mark the beginning of the end of the post-war liberal, democratic, rules-based system that Peter and Peggy helped to create (a feeling that has surely been confirmed by the events taking place today as I publish this piece). And, so quite unexpectedly, this private, family scattering of ashes also became for us a kind of bidding farewell to the remains of that post-WWII, rules-based
world, and the English landscape we could now just glimpse through the clouds, was showing up to us as symbolic of a (relatively-speaking) peaceful European and American “land of lost content” where we were also feeling we may never be able to “come again.”
As Peter and Peggy’s ashes finally disappeared forever into the wind, and we began quietly to walk back towards Malvern, there was a palpable sense among us that we were descending into a beckoning world that, once again, was beginning to be filled with the rapacious, ethno-nationalist, fascistic kind of politics that Peter and Peggy worked so hard to ensure would never return . . .
May it not be so.
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