July 7

​After the remains of the party has been cleared away, I revert to my afternoon walks with Great Grandmother. ‘In the last year of the war I also had my last year of school’ she said.
 
‘One of the things we learnt about in that final year from one of my Russian teachers was about some ancient Greek philosophers. Only one thing stuck in my head. It was about a life of reflection as the highest form of ‘the good life’. It struck me as so wrong, so self-congratulatory’.
 
‘it was so wrong because in neither the big decisions that affected our lives then, nor in our daily lives, did we have any time to reflect or even much of a choice. When the women of the town took the decision to continue the summer migration during the war they did not have time to weigh all the alternatives. Similarly when the war ended I had no choice about marriage.

After the war my father returned. He had already promised me to his closest friend from the war. The other girls of my age group were in the same situation.

​The world we faced was not a world of reflection. It is a world where most of us have to live with the hand we are dealt. In any definition of a good life we have to embrace the vast majority who face a daily struggle in a world determined for them by others’.