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War, What Is It Good For? (Clue: Absolutely Nothing)

A long-term friend escaped Bosnia and the war in the 1990s. She’s a remarkable woman, arriving in the UK with a solitary suitcase and slowly, steadily working her way towards receiving an award for Businesswoman of the Year. War equips a person with more than just resilience. If one’s psychology goes the right way, it can offer up tenacity in many forms, a profound form of self-love, fearlessness, and a deep sense of purpose underpinned by a great intolerance for the trivial.

My mother was caught up in the Libyan Revolution. She was married to my stepfather, an ambassador at the time, and speaking with her on Skype proved incredibly destabilising. She seemed blissfully unaware of what the rest of the world was seeing. My attempts to urge her to leave were wasted. I remember the now-comical moment when I told her she would run out of food supplies and how, no doubt in her motherly way of reassuring, she grabbed a tin of biscuits next to the computer and said, “Look, I’ve plenty of food.” My mother and stepfather were in the newspaper as they disembarked from the last boat to leave Libya before Gaddafi was executed.

Not long afterwards, my stepfather was stationed in Egypt. They arrived just before there was — guess what — another revolution. Fortunately, this time they got out more easily.

So you might well imagine my surprise to learn that my sister, who has lived in Qatar for a decade or so, is now embroiled in the beginnings of war. Once more, I have been telling her to get out. But she, in her naturally positive demeanour, has been speaking about her dogs and where would they go, how her husband has now gone back to work, how her children have online schooling. It seems somewhat insane that the mind seeks stability and sameness, even when rockets are flying overhead. And yet perhaps that is exactly what the mind does in order to survive: it domesticates the unfathomable.

The only comparisons that I’ve known in London were the IRA bombs of the 1980s and then later the Al-Qaeda attacks. Perhaps due to my age, the IRA bombs left more of an impression. I can recall moving away from “suspicious packages”, not standing too close to rubbish bins at stations — until they were all removed. I remember trying to imagine the size of the bomb, whether it would tick, and how close you would have to be to suffer the blast. The IRA were brutal with their attacks. Being a horse lover, I recall being devastated by the blast near Buckingham Palace; a brutal nail bomb that severely maimed and killed both horses and soldiers.

A few years later, I brushed up alongside bombs again as a late teen when working at the Wellcome Laboratory on a temporary work placement. I was told by my boss that when I left, I had to check under my car to make sure there were no bombs. The animal activists at the time saw no problem with blowing up people in favour of sparing the rats. Still a contentious area, I know. I recall staring back at him blankly at an age where just speaking to someone in a position of power would make me furiously blush, and nodding as if I knew exactly what a bomb looked like — too shy to ask. I would then feign a quick gaze under the car before leaving and hold my eyes tightly shut as I started the engine.

I suppose the similarity between my former bomb experiences and both my mother and sister’s is how quickly any strange situation can become normalised. We adjust with alarming speed. The unacceptable becomes routine; the surreal becomes domestic. It happened to us all during lockdown, when governments around the world found they could control us and did so, albeit chaotically yet adroitly. New laws were passed. The world became smaller. Before long, what had felt extraordinary became ordinary, and the good rose to the surface where it could.

My sister is on a mothers’ WhatsApp group that has shared poems. In her usual way of handling things — with humour — she has put together a sardonic playlist: In the Air Tonight, Rocket Man, 19th Nervous Breakdown, Help!, Stayin’ Alive, U Blow My Mind and so on. She is watching all her favourite comedians. Exercising in the locked bathroom to escape her sons. I asked her whether it was true or AI-generated about the radar station being blown up and she told me that she and the kids were going on a road trip to investigate later. I didn’t at first get the joke.

What makes the human mind so resilient both during and after war scenarios, perhaps has a great deal to do with humour. My friend from Bosnia struggles to take most things seriously, even her own success. It’s wonderfully refreshing, and her Serbian and Croatian friends all possess a similar, slightly darkly warped humour too. Something the British certainly excel at and maybe, as an island, we’ve had to, given the attacks from the Romans, Vikings, French and Germans we’ve endured over the centuries. Perhaps this special form of sarcasm has its roots in being conquered, presenting as ironically cynical and therefore, perhaps, foolish at times, but tough and scathing with it too.

The parts of the brain most affected by the trauma of war are those to do with fear, memory, vigilance and emotional regulation; and, like all trauma, it can produce post-traumatic growth — or not. The not, sadly, is prevalent in so many war veterans. But there is also, sometimes, an opposite effect: greater clarity, stronger instinct, less tolerance for nonsense, more gratitude, more grit. I was told by a doctor many years ago that the men coming home from the trenches after war suffered profound loneliness on returning home. They missed their comrades. Missed the solidarity. Even in horror, there had been a strange and binding sense of purpose.

My sister has been in lockdown much longer than the UK, which wasn’t easy with three children, and now she’s back there again. For how long, nobody knows. I hope she can hold onto her humour. It may be one of the few things that makes the intolerable bearable, one of the mind’s cleverest ways of keeping terror from taking over. My sister has asked if I’ll write her memoir after it’s over. I said to let it coalesce slowly first. I recently finished a book about a British couple who, when collecting their children from a surrogate mother, unwittingly got caught up in the Ukraine War. I’m currently writing my Bosnian friend’s memoir of the Yugoslav Wars; distance never makes sense of it, but the buffer of time at least stops its damage, stops further erosion of the spirit. A theme is emerging for the year: when will this world finally right itself? When will we realise it’s just not the answer?