Don't be afraid not to know what to do.

It was autumn 1944. I was about to be eleven. October was unusually cool and Vesuvius, one of the world’s most dangerous volcanoes, had just erupted a few months earlier. I’d naively thought it nature’s response to the eruption of Nazism. The second great world war, in which a total of 80 million of us eventually lost their lives was, thanks largely to the Russia’s overwhelming Red army, being won. Adolf Hitler was desperately trying to turn the tide.

I’d spent the last four years as an evacuee and an unhappy reluctant boarder in various unpleasant and xenophobic English schools. I’d become used to the sad moaning of sirens and then the droning sounds of the Luftwaffe’s Heinkels as formations of hundreds of them flew overhead on their way to bomb London. The undulating, shrill, sad and menacing sound of the sirens is one I can still hear. After a while I’d hear the reassuring sound of relief – the continuous and almost joyful moan of the ‘all clear’. We’d come safely out of a variety of air raid shelters and basements and see the all the frantic work being done to clear the human and masonry devastation of the latest raid.

I was spending a brief holiday in my parents’ house in Beckenham, a leafy suburb in South East London. Hitler’s ‘doodle bugs’, or V1 flying bombs, had been raining down on England and on London in particular. I remember finding it hard to believe that when the particularly harsh, menacing and unusually loud growl of their engines cut out right above you, it meant you were safe, because they didn’t fall vertically like ordinary bombs, they glided. When their noisy engines stopped suddenly overhead, there was an uncanny and oppressive silence. I remember feeling a terrifying sense of anticipation. Even though I knew we were safe, at least this time. But I still felt we were in extreme danger of imminent destruction and death

 You could sometimes see these bombs, looking like flying torpedoes, glide silently and rapidly down in a gentle, elegant slope. Then, after just a few moments of fascinating and calm quiet, you’d hear the wrenching explosions as they destroyed homes, seriously injured many people and abruptly ended many lives. I remember feeling selfishly thankful that this time it was all happening some distance away.  I didn't think of the poor people who were hit, I just felt relief.

Then Hitler’s last and most desperate weapon, the V2 rockets, fell on London. No warning growl or seconds of silence, but a terrifying, whining, whistling sound, an almost immediate explosion, the sound of falling masonry and then the terrible consternation of people’s screams and the screeching wheels of vehicles. I was in our Morrison shelter one night when I heard the violently loud whistling whine. I knew it was a V2. I felt its scream inside my head and was instantly frozen in terror. I remember trembling. The scream got louder and louder, lasting several moments, and then there was a deafening, appalling and ear splitting sound and the dreadful shake of a massive explosion.

 It felt like an axe splitting wood, or the tearing sound of lightening striking inches from your head, almost inside it. I can still remember my throat clenching with fear. When I think about it now, I imagine that I was experiencing the bizarre slow motion of a car crash.

 I particularly remember the strange and eerie silent pause, a peaceful prelude to the splintering sound of our windows blowing in and then the juddering feel of the blast shaking the whole house. Then there was a few seconds of calm before the almost musical crumbling sounds of distant falling masonry – a moment of silence again, followed by the tinkling noise of our crockery breaking. Finally, I remember the reassuring and normal sound of our happy and unaware big floppy dog lapping up the spilled Haliborange Vitamin C syrup from the broken bottle that had toppled from the top of the Morrison shelter.

 Somehow, despite the concert of horror, the dog lapping made things feel usual and normal. We started talking as we collected ourselves and felt safe and close – an ordinary family at least for the time being, with a dog, unaware of anything but our affections whose tail was wagging. It had all happened before the dawn and now it was over.

As the day lightened, I went out. The street was full of weary excitement as all sorts of uniformed men and women, stretchers and vehicles milled around. I heard screaming and sobbing and the words ‘over here’, ‘casualties’ and ‘dead’. I was eleven, and the word ‘dead’ meant little. But I distinctly remember feeling repeating waves of fear, elation, incomprehension, strange joy, helplessness and relief.

Today, as the thought that we’re now spending millions on bombs that we should be spending on ending poverty here and in less fortunate nations in the world, all my little boy’s wartime experiences came flooding back as I realised that we, us, our community, our nation are now bombing Iraq and Syria with the lust and relish of revenge and the crazy illusion that this will turn the tide.

 I’m realising that thousands of innocent children, some between seven and eleven years old, just as I was then, and their parents, their grandparents, their babies, their pets, their guests and friends too, are, right now as I write this, experiencing similar slow motion horror. There’ll be similarly torn human bodies, similarly abruptly stopped lives, similarly terrified families with grandparents like myself, parents too, their children and their pets becoming instant corpses, and very young eyes seeing body parts flying around like discarded debris on a building sites licked by flames.

 I feel profound fury with the would-be hapless hero, our Prime Minister David Cameron. I feel rage with Philip Hammond, our wealthy Foreign Secretary and his glib, specious and hopeless justifications. I feel a dull anger with their winning smiles and the normal shopping lives they lead, as they, and all the other self–righteous MP’s, few of whom have ever experienced carnage, voted to pursue a futile and jingoistic policy of bombing. It is, and will long be remembered, as the most terrible and shameful national misjudgement and disgrace.

Many thousands of innocent children in these ravaged countries will feel the same astonishment and terror as I did, aged seven, and many adults will feel fury that all the British did was, in the name of being patriots and staunch allies, create more death, destruction and desolation.

 No one in our community can fail to be shocked and outraged by the tragic deaths of relatively few citizens in France, the US, the UK and increasingly other nations, by the murderous plans and deeds of a handful of the terrorists whose behaviour we don’t yet understand. No one can fail to be horrified and mystified by the rapid growth of the wealthy and ‘medievally’ brutal Islamic state. No one can doubt that whoever they are their power needs to be annulled and completely quashed. But this quashing is unlikely to be achieved by air or by purely military means.

 The misguided folly and bravado our politicians have so far produced will create nothing but more of the chemistry of terror and, inevitably, new generations of increasingly determined, motivated and skilful jihadists wherever their plans are being hatched.

 Oh God, how I hope what I’m saying is stupid and wrong. But I doubt it. So far we’re ‘reacting’. But reacting will only continue to cause reaction, and so we’ll continue to find ourselves where we already are – playing a grotesque game of tennis where the ball is many thousands of lives and the net, incomprehension.

We have to find creative solutions. The first step in the creative thinking is to admit that we don’t know what to do. That takes more humility than our current leaders are willing to show us. Only then, and with more open minds and imagination than our political leaders don’t yet appear to possess, will we find a way forward to the peace we owe to future generations.

I don’t know who reads posts on social media, but if anyone in our government reads this one, please just pause for enough time and some deep reflection to understand why you disagree with me and, if you agree, then have the courage to make a brave start by not knowing what to do.