Lest we forget

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Did it all really happen? As I travelled happily by a strangely prompt and friendly London Underground and walked by beds of blooming wild flowers at the Olympic Park en route to basketball semifinals, I felt that all was right with the world. The thought of the collective hard work and goodwill within the NHS during the years of preparation was uplifting. At the opening ceremony we beamed with pride at the sheer, weird genius of the letters N, H, and S spelled out in lit up hospital beds. It’s odd to think then that this beloved institution is only 64 years old, less than a human lifetime.⇑

Head bent to a cold wind blowing limp autumn leaves along London streets, these euphoric memories seem a lifetime away. I look ahead and shiver. And not just for the bleak midwinter, but for the world’s gloomy future: a bloated industrial-military complex, the widening Great Pacific garbage patch, and continuing world hunger. Lonely, thin polar bears afloat on shrinking ice floes distress me. Get me out of here: I want to go back to women’s beach volleyball.

Another golden time that I would journey back to is just after the second world war. Having razed much of civilisation, humans set to, with a will to make things right. Those were heady times, when great global institutions were built. Warring countries sat down together at the United Nations. International human rights laws were passed that would never see the light of day now. And we got our national health service, free at point of delivery and funded by general taxation.

My grandfather served as a medical officer in the trenches and was gassed in the first world war. He limped on afterwards, serving the poor of Greenock, Scotland, often without payment, till he coughed himself into an early grave. I believe that both my parents, as many other postwar NHS doctors, were married to their jobs because they had experienced the alternative, when the world was set on destruction, and many poor people had no healthcare. From my generation onwards we understand this only in the abstract. I have had sleepless nights that we may forget the enlightened horse trading that led to the birth of the NHS, and we may let it slip away.

Human beings are supposed to work collaboratively and to rise above individual needs. Collective endeavour feeds our souls. Beset by a rising tide of social inequalities, we need to work together to make this world right. We know we can. We’ve proved we can. But will we?