Beginning at the end
RMC Happy New Year’s Eve from Felixstowe, Suffolk.
We’ve been here since Wednesday, having spent Christmas Eve to Boxing Day at home in Thaxted (a market town in Essex where I have lived for the past six years). Here in Suffolk, Josie the static caravan is our home – that being myself and my faithful feline companion Clio. She’s a 16 year old domestic short haired cat that I adopted from the RSPCA in 2009. She is a monocular pussy cat – having just the one eye (since I adopted her) but it hasn’t held her back any. As long as we have been together, she has been a fierce hunter and very adept at catching prey and dragging it home to be devoured – creatures large and small. That’s in the past though. We are both slowing down a bit now (me more than her) and after a particularly nasty scrap with a neighbour cat when I nearly lost her in 2022, she has been an indoor cat so the capture of prey these days has to be of the stuffed variety or feather on a stick type. Mostly she is content to hunker down by the fire and sleep – as indeed am I.
Well, that’s not strictly true. For a semi-retired bod, I am still quite busy. 2023 has been a year – of not only adjustment but also drama. After the dreadful depression of 2022 and coming so close to ending it all, this past twelve months has definitely been a much happier time and life is absolutely worth living, but there are some standout traumas that haunt me from this year. I met friends for lunch last weekend after a good while apart, and over the meal and talking to them about what had happened this year, I realised that the events of late April and early May are still very raw, and I had to take a moment to regain my composure. I suppose I was still relatively fragile in my own mental health, but the challenges of the Sudan evacuation – when British nationals were brought to Britain to escape the conflict – almost broke me both mentally and physically. Not just me – but my colleagues too. It is undoubtedly the hardest thing I have ever done – receiving the displaced Brits as they arrived in the UK, with next to nothing and needing immediate medical assistance, as well as clothing, food, water, and accommodation. Over five days we helped in excess of 2,000 people. We worked 18 hour shifts, had four hours of sleep and then were back at it again. We slept on floors in corridors, or snuck into a free hotel room, or removed ourselves to home just to regain some sense of normalcy, from the sea of refugees coming through the doors. Our needs were completely secondary to those arriving needing our help, and what that entire experience has given me is context.
I will forever remember one particular person who sat down at my desk (I was running the room, but also processing anyone who the other teams couldn’t handle) and this lady had a six month old clamped to her side, and a toddler holding her hand. She had fled with just the children and the clothes she stood up in. Running to the airport for the evacuation flight, dragging along her children, a sniper took a shot at her. She took off her head scarf and showed me the bullet wound – it had scraped the side of her head and a bloody bandage was applied to the spot. It must have been a chance in a million or more that he didn’t kill her with that bullet, and now here she was at my desk – hundreds of miles away and in a country she had never been to – very politely asking for some milk for her children, some clothes and a bed for the night. We did everything we could – not only for her and her children, but everyone else that came to us. It was a very humbling experience.
Having been coordinating the welcome point for Ukrainian refugees arriving in the UK since May 2022, we thought we were prepared for this crisis, but we couldn’t have been more wrong.
As well as context, what this experience also taught me was that you can never be truly prepared for the horrors of what man does to his fellow man.
Pax.