At 11am on November 11th I was sitting at the window of a Victorian farmhouse looking out over a village duck pond. I wondered how people ninety-five years ago had felt, hearing of the armistice in 1918.
I do not want to commemorate war.
In 2014 I will not only be mindful of those who engineered the slaughter, those who suffered it and those who patched up the wounded afterwards. In 2014 I will also be commemorating the lives of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times.
There are six people in this photograph.
One of them is my great-grandfather. He fought. He was gassed. He came home. That’s all I know. Family history reveals even less about my great-grandmother, beyond her slightly harassed expression. My grandfather is the little chap on the left. He had memories of Zeppelins that were quickly superseded by his own experiences of war later in the century.
Unremarkable lives perhaps. No grand heroic deeds, no political machinations, no pioneering cultural contributions.
There are some who say we should get 'out of the trenches' and see the Great War as history, not a collection of individual stories, as if there is some grand 'proper' history that should take precedence. A wide perspective is important of course. We have a need to analyse and understand how such a catastrophe came to pass; to make sense of how our society and systems have evolved since then.
However, as we look at the big, bold pattern of history we must acknowledge that the pattern is a weave. Like any fabric, history is made up of a multitude of threads, some warp, some weft, some embellished, some invisible. The patterns can only be seen as a whole by stepping away from the minutiae, but, in the words of historian Barbara Tuchman, 'the material must precede the thesis' - the whole bold pattern cannot be understood unless there is a real appreciation for individual threads.
We need all the stories - of combatants, conchies and clippies. Of housewives and members of the House of Lords. Without these single threads there would be no fabric and no grand pattern.
The late twentieth century has seen a vital surge in interest in micro history – the focus on the 'small'. We research history on a community level. We track our own ancestors. We are also learning to appreciate that those who seem passive in history are still part of it, whether of a racial or cultural minority, or of the gender not usually associated with war. No housewives went 'over the top', debated in Parliament, or designed weaponry, but their existence is most certainly part of the pattern. This is not only in relation to the war, as consumers, war-workers, or moral support. Their everyday experiences were as vital to them as any number of reports of battles and treaties only read about and felt from a distance.
Four years of conflict happened to all six people in my family photograph. A century later we reflect on the Great War and its aftermath. In 2014 I will commemorate the survival of the ordinary in extraordinary times.
Lucy Adlington runs the delightful History Wardrobe series of costume-in-context presentations which span 200 years of women’s history through fashion and the author of Great War Fashion: Tales from the History Wardrobe.
More from Lucy Adlington can be seen at www.historywardrobe.com, www.greatwarfashion.com and on Facebook and Twitter.