Heartbreaking reality of modern war

Jun 13 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

Laura Davis talks to Esther Wilson about her play about the impact of watching your children going off to war

A PANEL appears at the bottom of the TV screen – “News flash: three British soldiers killed in Iraq.”

Hundreds of families feel their stomachs lurch, desperately hoping they won’t recognise the names, even though this means they are praying for someone else to suffer their own worst nightmare.

For someone else to have to watch the coffin being lowered into the ground and to wake up each morning remembering their loss, to look at photographs years later and see only the one person who was no longer there.

Sometimes it takes hours for the names to be released, for all but a few families to return to their lives. But they never do, really, because the war is always there – on 24-hour news channels, on the internet, in the eyes of the smiling soldiers mucking about on YouTube.

“In the Second World War, mothers and wives didn’t know for months, until they suddenly got a letter, what was happening to their sons and husbands,” points out Esther Wilson, whose play, Ten Tiny Toes, about how a mother deals with seeing both her boys go off to war, opens at the Everyman tonight.

“Now there’s 24-hour news, they’ve got YouTube, mobile phones, they can see the conditions their sons are living in and that is making us fearful, news obsessed, it’s making us sick basically as a society.

“If it were one of my children, I wouldn’t be moving from the TV set, but what’s worse about that is that you’re constantly living with the anxiety of it, whereas before, rightly or wrongly, we didn’t know what was going on until our sons and husbands told us.

“If, on News 24, they say there’s been a soldier hit, for three or four hours until that family gets word, every single mother thinks ‘is it my child?’.”

This is one of the central themes of Ten Tiny Toes, a mother glued to her TV set until she feels she is able to find a voice within herself to protest about what she is seeing.

In researching the play, Wilson visited a peace camp based in Manchester during the 2006 Labour Party Conference.

It was set up by Military Families Against War campaigner Rose Gentle, whose 19-year-old son, Gordon, was killed while serving in Iraq, in 2004, after six months’ training.

“I was inspired by the fact that some mothers were campaigning, even though their sons didn’t want them to be vocalised in the media because it was embarrassing for them,” says Wilson, who was lead writer of Protected, the critically acclaimed docu-drama of personal accounts by the mothers of murdered street sex workers in Liverpool.

“They continued to do so because they felt they had to; they didn’t want to wait for their sons to be brought home in a body bag.

“I was shocked to find out that people are going on army surplus websites to buy equipment to keep them safe. When my children were at school, I’d buy them reflective gear to wear on their bikes, it’s that same desire to protect.

“One woman said she’d bought a pair of boots because the ones her son had been provided with were melting in the heat, the soldiers were getting foot rot like you got in the First World War.

“She had to sent them one at a time – wait two weeks until she got her family allowance before she could afford to send the second one.”

Also key to the plot is the lack of options for young men of 18 in today’s society. Wilson argues that the way in which they are being recruited by the armed forces – on dole queues and in schools – targets those from areas with economic problems.

One of the characters in Ten Tiny Toes joins the Army because he is tired of being a security guard on the door of designer boutique, Cricket.

“Because we’re a consumerist society now, unless you’ve got a lot of money you can’t afford the designer gear that everybody wants to buy.

“It’s particularly difficult for young men, and the Army offers a good alternative to drugs or guns or gangs, but the consequences of that is that they have to become brutalised in order to be able to fight,” she explains.

Despite this being a political play, Wilson has been careful to tell every side of the story, as director Polly Teale is keen to point out.

“One of the great things about the piece is that there are characters who have different relationships to the war, there are some who are very strongly pro,” she explains.

“Like any good play, Esther really allows us to look at the situation from lots of different perspectives. One of the things I love about the piece is that it’s asking big questions about the whole of our culture and about our own responsibility.”

One of the big tests of the play’s success will be the reaction of Military Families Against War members, who will be attending tonight’s premier.

“I don’t really know what they’ll make of it,” says Teale. “I think there’s something very powerful about your own story being told and that’s part of what’s driving these women.”

* TEN Tiny Toes is at the Liverpool Everyman from tonight until July 5.

lauradavis@dailypost.co.uk