Categories: uncategorized
Date: 16 September 2007 19:21:13
Today I went to a Quaker meeting which I really enjoyed, and found it easier than last week and then i decided to head off to the cinema to see Atonement. It is an absolutely beautiful film. Beautifully shot, directed and acted. It is quite a slow film so if you are looking for loads of action then it might not be for you, but I really enjoyed it. The story is clever, but not distractingly so and I really recommend it. Make sure you take some tissues with you though as it is a bit of a weepy.
The majority of the film is set during World War 2, and some of it is shot in a hospital. It made me really think of my Gran Nora who was a theatre nurse in Guernsey during the start of the war. She was meant to leave the island when the harbour was bombed by the Germans on 28 June 1940. Apparently Grandma was due to leave on the boat later that day as her step-mother and younger sister had been killed by a stray bomb. She had finished her shift at the hospital and gone back to Cobo to say goodbye to everyone, but she heard the news of the bombing and went straight back to the hospital for another long stint in theatre. I asked her what she saw when she arrived back at the hospital and she told me that the thing that made her decide to stay on the island was that she saw a young man lying on a trolley in the atrium of the Castel Hospital and his foot was hanging off. At that point she realised that she could not help her step-mother and sister, but she could stay and make a difference in Guernsey. I think the civilian doctors and nurses were the unsung heroes of the war, and the impact that they made on men and women who were in pain and dying cannot be underestimated. For me, as an islander, I will always live with the images of the occupation of Guernsey as they are fully visible on my island home and I sometimes wonder what life would have been like had the islands not been liberated.