Thought for the week: Celia Davies’ learning curve
‘It’s fair to say I pestered people!’
What motivates someone to take action? What sustains them? For me there were two catalysts.
The first was my granddaughter being required to join the Combined Cadet Force (CCF) to participate in the sports she needed to complete her PE ‘A’ level. The second was Armed Forces Day – an invention of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) that includes taking Cadet Forces to all our schools. Its youth policy aims to ‘create the conditions whereby recruiting will flourish’.
Aged sixteen, my granddaughter’s initial reaction to seeing younger pupils carrying weapons was: ‘Shit! Kids with guns. What’s that all about?’ But the CCF offered everything in sport she loved: games, activities, weekends away – plus top-quality gear for every occasion as well as excellent first aid training. So, within a short time, military uniforms, hierarchy, cleaning, loading and firing semi-automatic weapons, and taking part in military scenarios, became her norm. As she put it ‘You put your army head on’. She earned her three stripes, progressing from lance corporal, to corporal, to sergeant.
Meanwhile I did some research and found relevant glossy resources for pupils – but from the MoD! I did also found excellent peace resources, but they were all produced and published by individual organisations, individual faith groups, or individual activist groups. Mainstream schools rejected these as having a singular agenda and being biased.
My goal, then, was to see ‘peace packs’ on a par with what the military was producing, which schools would not reject as being partisan. A collaboration was needed!
It’s fair to say I pestered people! I pestered organisations like Forces Watch, Northern Friends Peace Board, CND, Pax Christi, Quaker Peace & Social Witness (QPSW), and my Local and Area Meetings. At any opportunity I delivered emotional and heartfelt reports, and wrote copious emails and letters. I also found the Peace Education Network (PEN), of which I was unaware. They all got the message that Celia wasn’t going to go away!
Then, one person, Izzy Cartwright at QPSW, saw my vision and ‘got it’ completely. One day I received an email from her which read: ‘Your enthusiasm jumped out of the page… I am already imagining a really lovely resource.’ PEN wanted to produce a resource: I’d got a result!
It seemed to have taken forever, but in fact, it took just eighteen months from idea to publication. My granddaughter went on to contribute ‘A pacifist in the cadets’ advocating that pupils should have the opportunity to participate in sport, outdoor pursuits and first aid, but ‘no drills, no guns, no bullying – in fact totally non-military’. The Teach Peace Pack has now been awarded the Global Dimension Award.
What sustains the activist? For me, role models like my parents: ‘quiet’ Quakers who lived their convictions. ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world – it is the only thing that ever has.’
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