Re: World War One


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Posted by Duncan on May 13, 2003 at 11:43:52 from 152.163.252.103 user Duncan.

In Reply to: Re: World War One posted by Peter H on May 08, 2003 at 16:33:57:


I think it is perfectly obvious (;0)))) that Bob Blackett was in fact a manual labourer from the Cumbrian coast who, inspired by Ruskin, travelled into the Lake District and walked the hills, writing his socialistic tracts and utopian poetry.

One day, while writing a particularly impressive essay on the condition of the working man, he encountered Jim Turner and his enchanting sister and they became firm friends. Much to the horror of the Turner's domineering Aunt, Bob and Molly struck up a romance and eventually married. They were banished from the grand lakeland villa, Beckfoot, and had to live in a tiny shepherd's hut.

Bob's work was considered too important for him to be called up early in the war, towards the middle of war Molly was expecting their first child, Ruth. Then the papers came, calling him to go to war.
"No!" Bob cried, "I will not kill working men on the battlefield!" and he spent the rest of the war in prison, receiving white feathers from the mocking women.

Jim Turner was a war correspondent in Russia and remained there in the early days of the revolution. When he returned to Britain the radical fire in his belly was stirred up and he banised his aunt from Beckfoot and invited Bob and Molly to come back and live at home. He had a secret and unexplained stack of cash which enabled him to maintain this lifestyle. When another child was on the way he purchased an old steamship and converted it into a houseboat and lived out many a happy year there, returning to Beckfoot in the colder months...

Bob Blackett saw his beloved Labour Party enter government in 1924 but was soon disillusioned and joined the Communist Party (much to his brother-in-law's secret delight, the Soviet Union were in fact financing his feverish book-writing) but, two years later, only a few years before Arthur Ransome began to chronicle the family's history, Bob Blackett was fatally wounded on the picket lines, during the General Strike. A policeman's baton caved in his skull.

A tragic tale, but really a romance - the poor, down-trodden factory worker had found his Utopia with his beloved Molly and his dear friend and comrade Jim, in the lakeland fells that were - for him - the landscape of the co-operative commonwealth...

I think, reading between the lines, the truth of this history is quite clear!


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