Peace tree

Yesterday I treated myself after a visit to the dentist with a trip to the British Museum. I wanted in particular to see a current exhibition: The American Scene, Prints from Hopper to Pollock. The exhibit was great, as was another that I saw, and I may well write about them over the next couple of weeks.

But you know how it is with the major museums – they’re just so BIG. After I left I decided to walk up to my station to go home. It’s only a fifteen minute walk, but after all those long echoing galleries, I realised I was really tired. I walked into Tavistock Square and slumped onto a bench in the shade.

The Square is a place that has a particular resonance now for us Londoners, because its perimeter road is the site of one of the 7/7 bombings in 2005. Footage of doctors running out of their meetings at the British Medical Association building right by the bomb site to help, and the mangled bus upon which the bomb was detonated, are engraved in our memories. Ironic that Tavistock Square, which is beautiful, contains a well-known statue of Gandhi, often garlanded with flowers.

Anyway, thoughts of the violence were running through my mind, and I was physically exhausted. Then I gradually came to realise that I was sitting opposite a cherry tree planted in 1967 to commemorate the victims of the Hiroshima bombing. I looked up at it, with the Spring sunshine filtered through its impossibly perfect blossoms, and felt suddenly at peace, energy restored.

I realised that as long as we remember, as long as we find ways to commemorate the losses, those dead voices can still be heard.

I took some photographs right from where I was sitting, cut them up and combined them into the composition above. To me, it says something about everything being a necessary part of one whole.