June 10

​Today Great Grandmother talked to me about the lessons she learnt from the gatherings with her friends up here on this rocky outcrop.

‘The most important lesson for us was quite unexpected’ says Great Grandmother, ‘It was the value we came to attach to uncertainty.

None of us in those wartime years could be sure we would see fathers, husbands, sons or brothers again in this life. In our efforts to cope with the overhanging sense of uncertainty our talk up here in the evenings moved without conscious break from our most trivial daily anxieties to much more fundamental questions about what we could believe in.’
 
‘Don’t get me wrong’ says Great Grandmother. ‘We women were not philosophers, or even well educated, or conscious of talking about matters which people have pondered for centuries. But the war forced us to confront death in our families. Inevitably we wondered about whether that was all, the end, or whether there might be something beyond.
 
Our communist leaders put science on a pedestal. But we knew, even in our ignorance, that there was no scientific knowledge on which to draw about another world.

​If there is another life to which our brothers and fathers had gone, we came to accept that it is not accessible through any form of what we call ‘knowledge’ available to us. We came to accept that this most fundamental of beliefs has to remain uncertain’.