Let’s talk about peace
Rebecca Hardy reports on some uplifting activities
Take 1,000 children, five primary schools and what do you get? Answer: a room full of noise, which is ironic, considering we have come here to talk about peace. I am sitting in ‘The Light’, the Large Meeting House at Friends House in London on 9 November, two days before the centenary of Armistice Day. Bob Marley’s ‘Redemption Song’ strums gently over the tannoy as the room fills with the bustle of children. The air has an excited, anticipatory feel.
We are here as part of the INSPIRE project, of which Quakers are one of the organising partners, alongside the Oasis Charitable Trust. Covering a wide programme of events, from Finsbury Park Mosque to Coventry Cathedral, hundreds of schools are holding assembles and activities all in the name of ‘peace’. According to Isabel Cartwright, peace education programme manager for Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM), it’s about building a ‘new generation of peacemakers’.
She says: ‘Talking about peace at remembrance needs to be more than a moment of melancholic reverie. It needs to be about what we do next… For Quakers, INSPIRE is not just about the day of remembrance – it is about a peaceful future.’
Aisling Griffin from Pax Christi, which, like Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM), is part of the Peace Education Network, agrees: ‘It’s a good way to look at how we remember. We tend to forget that side of remembrance – particularly with young children, when their minds are so enquiring. It’s a good chance to look at what peace actually means.’
The children certainly seem to be engaged this morning, with a programme of peace songs, performances and speakers, as well as contributions from the children themselves. One pupil reads ‘In Flanders Fields’ by John McCrae, while another group tells the story of Japanese girl Sadako, who folded paper cranes for peace. There’s a Peace Tree, specially created by students, and a performance based on one school’s experience of training pint-sized peer-mediators.The result is a surprisingly powerful hour-and-a-half, with emotional highs and lows. I like to think it takes a lot to make me cry, but 1,000 children singing the peace anthem ‘Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream’ nearly manages it. By the time an illustrated The Day the War Came is narrated (‘War took everything/war took everyone/I was ragged, bloody, all alone’), I am seriously choked up. When ‘Imagine’ chimes out, I am virtually inconsolable.
‘Today you are a party of huge national movement,’ cries out the compere Julie Payne, before leading a round of ‘If you’re happy and you know it’ and encouraging them to ‘make some noise’. The children are told that ‘it’s not just about remembering’, but ‘thinking about how we can build a peaceful future’. Then the children stand up and make their own statements. ‘It’s natural to have conflict but we need to be able to disagree without a fight,’ says one preternaturally wise junior pupil, who I immediately want to take home to meet my twins. Another says: ‘We need to stand up for people who are suffering’, while another chips in pithily: ‘We need to give pick-ups and not put-downs.’
The morning also brings out some peace-world heavyweights. Maya Evans, a councillor in Hastings who runs a peace group called Voices for Creative Non-Violence UK, talks about the work she does with street children in Kabul, Afghanistan. ‘This is probably the best use of my time,’ she tells me, ‘to show the perspective of the young people I’ve met in Afghanistan and how war has impacted their lives. It’s such an honour to be invited to this event. It should be something that every school child has an opportunity to do.’
Marigold Bentley, of Quaker Peace & Social Witness (QPSW), talks about conscientious objectors and the children wave symbols of white feathers in the air. They’re then encouraged to turn around and say ‘good morning’ to everyone around them – whether they know them or not – and ‘do it with a smile’, as ‘it makes people feel warm and included and welcome’.
Then the morning draws to a close with a rousing rendition of ‘This is Me’, from the musical film The Greatest Showman, and does the room glow a little brighter – or is that just me?
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