Thought for the Week: The tale of a white feather
Martin Raven reflects on an encounter
About eight years ago, when I was still working in the parks as a gardener, I picked up a white feather that was lying on the ground. I carefully put it into the woolly hat I was wearing in a sort of Robin Hood style and continued with my work.
Imagine my surprise when a lady, who came nearly every day to the park to walk her dog, rushed up to me. She was obviously agitated and said I should remove the feather at once.
I asked her why. Her reply was that she had given out white feathers during the war to civilians and she felt that, in retrospect, she had done wrong and that my white feather made her feel really awful. The sight of mine had brought back enormously strong feelings. I told her that I was a Quaker and that my father was one of the people to whom these feathers had been given. I think I told her that he had been a headmaster at the time, but she still insisted that I remove the feather to make her feel more comfortable and we parted.
I had been surprised by the depth of feeling, by the guilt she obviously felt, and by the fact that she hardly seemed old enough to have been giving out feathers during the war. This tale is a tribute. It shows that the peace testimony of conscientious objection works.
I did not tell her that the school my father worked at had to round up children displaced by war and found wandering in London’s ruins. Nor did I tell her that he was based at a military unit at Colchester on which he had a typical small holding where he did research to find out what could be grown to maximise small plots of land for the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign.
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