In the Liberal Jewish Cemetery in Willesden there are plaques on the wall commemorating the dead. Most are from over fifty years ago and tell simple stories of love and loss in a family; given added poignancy by the knowledge that the mourners who installed the plaque with such loving care will now have joined the mourned in the long tight rows of dignified grey graves outside.

We are as a shadow.

Two, next to each other, tell a wider story in an equally quiet way. One man, born in Breslau in 1903; died in London in the 1960s. An escape from Germany both personal and historic. Another, a young man of 22, eldest son of his loving parents, died of his wounds in Spain in 1938. “Everything he had, he gave for his ideals.”

We are as a grass.

Walter was 95. Sent for safety to his uncle in England in 1937 at the age of 14 as the Nazis tightened their grip, he was arrested by the Gestapo while trying to return to visit his parents in the summer of 1938 and re-deported as a “Jewish alien”. His parents escaped Germany just in time in 1939 – which did not stop Walter and his father being interned at the outbreak of war by the British authorities as “enemy aliens”.

A founder member of CND, Labour Party candidate in the 1959 General Election, he saw his socialism as an expression of his deeply held Jewish faith and values; requiring empathy and solidarity with all oppressed and persecuted peoples; and was as likely to argue with his rabbi as he was his Party Secretary. He never believed that the solution to persecution was to become a persecutor of others. He had more dignity than that.

He marched to Trafalgar Square in 1956 to oppose  the Suez invasion – and from it to Aldermaston in 1958, supported the Committee of 100 sit downs against nuclear weapons in 1960 – and on up to today – he never let up. At the 2005 Labour Party conference – at the age of 80 – he heckled Jack Straw’s claim that the UK was only intervening in Iraq to build peace and democracy. His one word comment “Nonsense!” an irrepressible outburst of indignation at such transparent flim flam, earned him forcible ejection by a pair of security heavies and detained and questioned under section 44 of the Anti-Terrorism Act. The backlash that this generated not only led to Walter receiving an apology from Tony Blair, but also to his election to the Labour National Executive the following year. It also partially derailed a practice, then being sneaked in and becoming habitual, of using Anti -Terror legislation to detain anyone protesting against a centre ground mainstream consensus. According to The Scotsman, 600 other people had been detained under this act at the same conference – some protesting at the Iraq war, some OAPs complaining about pensions.

He was a long time friend of Jeremy Corbyn dating from their time together in CND in the 1980’s. Jeremy would have attended the funeral had he not been in Normandy for the D Day commemoration; and sent a heartfelt message and tribute. Pictures of Jeremy on that day quietly listening to D- Day veterans of Walter’s generation show the kind of humanity and opposition to patriotic bombast that they shared. Its hard to imagine Donald Trump or Boris Johnson sitting so quietly and thoughtfully, nor listening so intently. Walter always stood for the view that respect  comes from love and brings us together – a human quality which we all owe to each other – the opposite of self subordination to those with power or wealth governed by ritual.

He was gentle, irascible, stubborn, principled, dedicated. A good man, whose like we need more of.

I did not know him well, and the longest time I spent with him was when he offered me a lift up to a Labour CND AGM in Sheffield some time in the late 1980’s. When people who knew him asked me how I was getting there and I said “Oh, Walter is giving me a lift”, they would smile and raise their eyebrows. One of them should have warned me.

It was clear almost from the first second I strapped myself into the passenger seat that Walter was a spectacularly bad driver. It got worse from there.

Driving off with barely a backward glance, to a symphony of horns and barrage of startled looks from other drivers, we kangarooed  a bit up to Stoke Newington, where Walter drove into a petrol station by way of the exit.

He parked by the petrol pumps in front of an outraged orthodox Jewish guy – who had come in the right way with every expectation of being able to park at a petrol pump and fill up- but instead had us suddenly appearing right in front of him and blocking his way. He got out in his big black hat, hands on hips, and glared at Walter, who glanced vaguely at him and gave a dismissive wave of the hand; before realising that the petrol tank was on the other side of his car from the pump. Exasperated but undeterred, Walter heaved the pipe across the top of the car and just about got the nozzle into the tank and filled it that way. The other driver looked straight at me and I shrugged with what I hoped was a winning grimace.

Driving round the cars in front and exiting through the entrance, we headed for the Motorway, which you would think might be smoother going.

And so it came to pass, except for Walter’s alarming difficulty in maintaining either a steady speed or any lane disciple whatsoever. We would continually be drifting from the slow to the middle lane and sometimes maintain a steady position straddling both, with other vehicles forced to suddenly brake or swerve around us – some of them honking in terror as they did. Sometimes we would bump over a cat’s eye and Walter would reflexively flinch and take his foot off the accelerator, causing us to slow down unpredictably – forcing more swerves and honks from all around us.

When we got to Sheffield, we encountered a roundabout. Being uncertain of where we were, or which road to go off on, Walter stopped – on the roundabout – while he gathered his thoughts. More honks and swerves.

As we finally walked in to the meeting in Sheffield University, people looked round and smiled at my shocked, ashen complexion and somewhat staring eyes. “Ah, another survivor” said one.

I have been grateful ever since that I’m still here, that Walter, despite this journey and many others like it before and since, lived on to 95 and was as disputatious and questing as ever. Captured by one of his last conversations that has been making me smile since Carol Turner told it at the funeral.

5 in the morning on one of the last days.

Walter: Nothing is certain. I might not make it to the morning.

Carol: Oh, you’ll make it to the morning Walter.

Walter: But how can you be SURE?

We are as grass.

The threatening tattoo on the tightly muscled man at the bus stop turns out to be of Winnie the Pooh in the hundred acre wood.

In the bright clear morning, a grey faced man in a battered green anorak and felt boots, lined beyond his years and looking like Strider in the Fellowship of the Ring but with a bottle leaning heavily in his pocket makes heavy weather of pushing a bike away from the shop.

The slightly plump proprietor of the Afghan greengrocers in Colindale – a tiny labyrinth that still has the floor tiles of the chemists it used to be – crammed with humming refrigerators of Halal meat – fruit and veg that varies from fresh to salvageable, shiny aubergines, bright red vine tomatoes – a new continent of  dried fruits and seeds, golden raisins, red raisins and apricots and nuts with unknown names – caves of biscuits and gur – alcoves of tins and pickles – a wall of unknown Persian pastries -lolls behind his tiny counter like a Pasha; wearing a contented smile and one of those Afghan hats that looks like a pie made of felt. He gives us a good deal for Mangoes.

Trump’s Apprentice

Gurning Nigel sneaks

Out the back as Peterborough

says “You’re fired.”

Willesden High Street

Ziggurats of gold

Baklava – frame thin hunched men

Smoking mean roll ups.

Gravestone

‘Gainst the grave stone

a forgotten umbrella

leans in tribute.

June 6th … D- day.

The re-opening of the western front in 1944 is usually seen in the West as the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany. 24 000 soldiers from the United States, Britain and Canada struggled up the beaches of Normandy making the way for 140 000 more to land behind them; or were dropped behind the Atlantic Wall by parachute or glider to claw out a beachhead against ferocious Axis resistance from 50 000 soldiers – many of them conscripts from eastern Europe -that left 10 000 allied and 4- 9 000 German causalities by the end of the first day – just under half of them dead.

The first 25 minutes of “Saving Private Ryan” is a sickening vision of what this must have been like; and anyone tempted to spin this horror into cheap and easy glories to batten on, to stand on platforms taking salutes while dreaming of golf courses and real estate developments, or demean these men’s suffering into unearned patriotic bragging – “two World Wars and one World Cup, doo dah, doo dah” – should be forced to watch this sequence and imagine themselves in it.

This was a huge struggle. By the end of July,  1 332 000 allied troops in Normandy were pushing 380 000 Germans back towards Paris. Casualties at this stage were around 120 000 on each side. Large cemeteries had to be built to hold and commemorate them.

This much – in outline at least – we remember. There have been commemorations on the 50th, 60th and now the 75th anniversaries. There have been feature films. Google this and you will see “7 must see D Day films” – so there must be quite a few more that are “maybe see”. Those of us of a certain age will have seen “The Longest Day” almost as many times as “The Great Escape” and have memorised catch phrases from it – “the trouble with being one of the few is that you keep getting fewer”…”The Luftwaffe has had its moment” etc etc. We are not likely to forget.

But forgetfulness can sometimes be less significant than the things we are blind to in the first place. The British version of World War 2 puts us in the centre of things, much like maps here centre on the Greenwich meridian. The Eastern Front barely features in the collective world view here – in which “plucky little Britain” “stood up to Hitler” with a bit of help from the Yanks. The Russians barely feature at all, though, if pushed, some people could reference Stalingrad – the crushing defeat in 1942 that lost the German Army 17 divisions and its delusions of invincibility – as quite important.

There are no English language feature films about Operation Bagration.  Most people here will never have heard of it unless they are military history buffs. This leads to – or grows from – an insular way of looking at the world that can further lead to serious self important mistakes when making judgments about it – in the same way that absorbing the proportions of Mercator’s projection maps makes appreciating the real and relative size of places almost impossible.

Between 23 June and 19 August 1944, an offensive by 1 670 000 Soviet troops killed or captured almost all of the half a million experienced German soldiers of Army Group Centre in what is now Belorussia. The scale of this is almost unimaginable. Army Group Centre was a quarter of the entire Wehrmacht on the eastern front. They suffered 400 000 casualties out of an initial force of 450 000.  20 Divisions were destroyed. Three quarters of the corps or divisional commanders were killed or captured. Prisoners taken in just one sector north of Minsk were paraded through Moscow 20 abreast and took an hour and a half to pass.

Red army losses were 180 000 killed and another 590 000 wounded.

So, if watching the coverage of today’s commemoration, cast your eyes and thoughts eastward as well, lest the things we are used to remembering block our minds from the things we need to know about.

The trench like strips dug out by Brent council to sew the seeds for its wildflower bee corridor jogged my memory to an actual trench that was dug in the playing field opposite where I grew up.

Thurrock council got round to filling it in during the early 1960s. Until them it had been a set of undulations at the top of the slope that we used to run up and down and in and out of. Quite fun. It was a little way away from a terrifying piece of play equipment that was like a battering ran slung with chains onto a framework like an enormous swing that bigger kids would shove wildly backwards and forwards and tell dark tales of getting enough momentum to make it loop the loop. Luckily, no one was killed.

The trench had been there since 1938. During the Munich crisis everyone was expecting war to be imminent. The Luftwaffe bombing of Guernica the previous year during the Spanish Civil War was newly scorched into people’s anxieties through newsreels at the cinema. People would often go to the pictures several times a week and there were several cinemas – including the mighty “State” on George Street, with seating for 2 200 people a time. There was room for another 800 at the Empire just round the corner in the High Street and another 1 500 at the Regent on New Road. People experienced the shock of this news together, socially – not just in family groups in front of the telly as they might have done later, or individually through their mobile phone as they would now. Word got around. Directly. Everyone believed that “the bomber will always get through”.

In the absence of the plans or capacity to issue air raid shelters that were in place by the following year, the local council dug trenches in parks for people to shelter in. Local World War 1 veterans like my grandfather – who knew how to dig a trench from bitter experience – went with their garden spades to help out.

On first hearing about this – and not knowing that it was an air raid precaution – I had assumed that the trench had been dug as a military gesture. It was at the top of a slope up to our estate’s western horizon on Wallace Road – which was sufficiently close to keep sunsets cosily domestic enough not to be a place you’d want to ride off into – and therefore perfect for the Home Guard to put flanking fire into the side of any Wehrmacht division foolish enough to venture up Hathaway Road in search of Fish and Chips at the Modern.

The mystery of the topsoil trenches in the local park is solved. Brent council has dug hundreds of long wavy strips like them across parks from one end of the borough to the other; and planted wild flower seeds to provide a bee corridor. With the terrifying decline in insect populations globally – and the sight of people in China already having to pollinate trees by hand – this is a very timely initiative. Parts of local parks were already left to “meadow” last year – making them somehow gentler, more relaxed places – as well as encouraging insect life. This is a very limited form of re-wilding – and we won’t be getting wild boar any time soon – but looking across the park now is more like being in the countryside than an over clipped, tame city space; and all the more therapeutic for that. Now that London is the world’s first National Park City and aiming for 50% green space by 2050 – even as the population goes up to nine million – we will need more and more of this.

On the high counter in the window at Nandos, three ambulance workers with thousand yard stares, sit in a line munching wraps.

Outside Kingsbury Fruit and Veg, a doppelganger of Ghandi, sitting on a bollard feeding birds.

A Buddhist priest in crimson robes carries his shopping to the bus stop, staring at the world though aviator shades, next to serious young Romanians in their Sunday best carrying heavy black bibles.

After watching and accompanying the last student climate strike demo up Whitehall to Trafalgar Square- recognising the superfluousness of my presence as an aging observer and needing the loo and a bit of mental decompression – I drop into the National Gallery.

Unwilling to disrespect it by just using it as a toilet stop – I decide that every time I go in I will take a longer look than usual at a couple of pictures and really think about them.

With no method or focus I wander through galleries full of vast swirling renaissance canvasses, epic classical dramas in operatic glowing oils that can merge into an acid trip of gloriousness if you keep your eyes unfocused. A trip in the key of baroque.

One gallery is bare. No paintings, no people. Dusty, echoey space with nothing to look at. Just deep green wallpaper, rather faded and dog eared in places – not renovated for years, tired and well used like everything else in the public realm; disguised when in use by all the heritage that obscures it.

Scorn, by Veronese catches my eye. Part of a series of four paintings called Allegories of Love, painted in the 1570’s. A semi naked man – wrapped in a shiny pink cloth that coils around his body like a snake; suggesting movement and sensuality while carefully covering his genitals – lays prostrate on the steps of a temple; while, standing above him, Cupid wallops him with his bow. Cupid looks determined and righteous. Above and behind Cupid on the temple wall is a faded and broken gargoyle of Pan – god of excess in all things – staring away into the distance with sightless stone eyes, as if he can’t bear to watch. He is the colour of ash. Next to the man’s outstretched beseeching hand – and  on a falling right to left diagonal line from Pan at the top right, through Cupid in the centre – are two women at the bottom left. The one closest to the man – and staring at him as if she would be fancy him if Cupid wasn’t beating him up – has her breasts bared as a symbol of temptation herself. Her companion – taking her by the hand and leading her away from temptation – is wearing a veil; and looking back through and beyond Cupid – presumably to something heavenly going on inside her own head.

The notes in the Gallery talk about the possible torments of feelings that are scorned, love that is unrequited. They do not refer to the historical context – that the 1570’s were the eighth decade into the first pandemic of syphilis. That the greyness of Pan and the whiplash blows of Cupid’s bow could symbolise the diseased consequences of sexual athletics, and the divided response of the women the conflict between desire and fear. The bare breasted woman looks torn between attraction and disgust. Her chaste companion looks as though she is averting her eyes because because she knows she needs to.

The ambiguity of this overtly moral painting may have only been possible because Veronese lived and worked in commercial, republican Venice, rather than straight laced Imperial Spain or any part of the Holy Roman Empire. “We painters take the same liberties as poets or mad men” was his rather brave response to the local branch of the Inquisition – when they pulled him in for questioning after he’d put jokes into a painting of the Last Supper. Laughter, it would seem,  implicitly being the work of the devil. He avoided punishment by changing the title to “The Feast in the House of Levi”. which is one way to do it. The expectations of the Spanish Inquisition may well not have allowed him to get away with that.

You can see the painting and a short version of the gallery notes here.

https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/paolo-veronese-scorn

The Portrait of a young Woman by Bordone is from a little earlier in the century and could probably be sub titled “He’s behind you.”. A very peevish and frightened looking young woman with a pursed mouth and flushed cheeks, dressed in shimmering pink silk, holds something mysterious in her right hand while glancing anxiously to her left. The unseen object she is holding is on the end of a chain that wraps around her waist and dangles in front of it. Is it a key, a note, a love philter?

Most of the background is a gloomy, heavy columned chamber, but in the top left of the painting, in the same direction as her look but unseen by it, is a picture within the picture. Out of a window, a perilous looking stair case with no banisters or balustrades – looking like one of Escher’s labyrinths – is topped by a gallery. Standing at the top in the distance is a man who looks as though he has suddenly frozen, after spying the young woman from behind. This is painted small and hazy, but there is a disturbing sense of menace about it. Is he a stalker, a forbidden lover, a spy for her family? She seems aware that someone is behind her but not sure who or where.

National Gallery notes here.

https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/paris-bordone-portrait-of-a-young-woman

On Whitehall during the last student climate strike – a thousand or two students full of life streaming North past Downing Street and the Cenotaph, all the monumental memorials to futile conflicts, beyond the Ministries and the overbearing equestrian statutes of long forgotten chiefs of the Imperial General Staff, chanting for their future – demonstrating in more ways than one that the old emperors have no clothes.

Alongside them – seemingly from a different universe – a few old men carrying Union Jacks, drifting in the opposite direction down to Parliament Square to call for a Brexit back to  world in which all problems can be solved by closing the borders.

Three of them are also off duty football fans. One with a Chelsea shirt and matching smirk, loudly broadcasting his internal monologue with the self referential swagger of an invading army. No one likes it? He don’t care.

“Bunch of Corbyn supporters. He’s a wanker!” I look him in the eye and give him one of the old fashioned looks that my family has cultivated for generations and saves up for moments such as this.

He looks nonplussed for a moment. Looks back at me slightly astonished.

“Corbyn supporter?” (as if he’d never met a real one)

“Ye -ah” Holding his gaze and saying it as though we’re far more normal than he thinks we are.

Turns to one of his mates – still astonished. “Corbyn supporter!”

Both of them turn to look at me. I look back, smiling benignly. The second, equally astonished _ “Corbyn supporter?!”

“Yeah. Gives us hope.”

They are swallowed up – still looking puzzled – by the oncoming wave of tourists – who are doggedly seeking out the sights of our museum of a society (perhaps not realising that they have just walked past a living example of them).