The Sound of Music

Hi, I was in London with Grace and Sheila and we went to see The Sound of Music at the London Palladium. It was a pretty good show (if you like that sort of thing!) but I found the final scene most disturbing. What happens is the family sing some songs at a festival in Salzburg in 1938 and then they run away to Switzerland as the Nazis want the Baron to captain a ship in the German navy. So the final scene is done by turning the theatre into a festival setting complete with some armed Nazis in uniform and several giant Nazi hangings complete with Swastikas.

This really upset me. I wept and wept thinking about how my family and other people's families and lives were changed for the worst by the Nazis. I think the hangings were in bad taste and whilst it was good theatre I am disturbed and not sure this is the best way for the many children in the audience to understand these horrors from our history. We visited the Cabinet War Rooms the previous day so all this Second World War stuff was around for me.

I would have liked to have felt angry but I wept instead. So the next day in a taxi to Bethnal Green and the taxi man talked about this mother being evacuated from the East End in the War and about her nearly dying in the disaster at Bethnal Green tube station when many did die in a stampede in the War. He spoke of how kind the Jewish people were from the Whitechapel area (nearby) providing clothes and other help. That had me crying again. And then he says 'Not like the Bangladeshi people today'. Oh God.

I think it is natural for most of us to feel compassionate. Yes it can become dulled and we can develop prejudice. Most people of my generation in postwar Britain were fed a diet of anti German feelings - the old black and white war films, the war comics, the plastic aeroplanes. I think the anti German jokes that still have currency are a residual way of dealing with these feelings. It doesn't make it right and when will it end? Meanwhile under our very noses the same racism remains.

So maybe the Sound of Music has got me thinking usefully!

best to all,

Bill-on-bike in the sunshine