Vox Meditantis

31st August, 1962

The motorway stretches endlessly ahead, black tarmac shimmering in the heat like a serpent’s back. Father drives in grim silence whilst Mother pretends to doze, her handkerchief pressed to her temple. We’ve been travelling since dawn, fleeing – though they won’t call it that – from the troubles in Birmingham. The factories are closing, Father says, and there’s talk of unrest amongst the coloured workers who’ve come up from the Commonwealth. “Better opportunities in the North,” he mutters, but I can see the defeat written across his shoulders like a yoke.

I watch the countryside roll past – fields of barley bending in the wind, their golden heads heavy with seed. Everything grows and dies and grows again, yet we humans seem intent only on the dying part. The hedgerows are thick with blackberries, fat and glistening, but we dare not stop to pick them. Always moving, never taking root, like dandelion seeds scattered on the wind.

The wireless still crackles with reports from South Africa. It has been weeks since they seized Mandela near Howick – ‘the Black Pimpernel’ finally cornered, they boast – and the papers say charges for the strike and his travels abroad are being readied in Pretoria. Father nods his approval at each bulletin, but something in my chest burns with a fury I cannot name. How is it that a man fighting for his people’s freedom is cast as the villain, while those who would keep him in chains are hailed as righteous? The world has gone mad – or perhaps the madness is only that some of us see it too clearly.

In the boot of our Morris Oxford lies my life in three cardboard boxes – books, clothes, and this journal amongst them. Mother found me writing last evening and asked why I persist in “scribbling my thoughts away.” Why indeed? Perhaps because the words inside me would otherwise fester like unpruned roses, growing wild and thorny until they choked the very life from me. When I put pen to paper, something takes root – not in soil, but in the permanence of ink. My thoughts become seedlings that might one day bloom into understanding, or at least into questions worth asking.

The great men in Parliament speak of order, of tradition, of keeping the gardens of Empire neatly trimmed. But I have seen what lies beneath their manicured lawns – the tangled roots of injustice, the poisoned soil of centuries. In Algeria, they have finally won their freedom after eight years of blood. The newspapers call it chaos, but might it not be the natural growing season after too long a winter?

We pass a field of sunflowers, their faces turned uniformly towards the light. How I envy them their certainty, their instinctive knowledge of which way to turn. I feel pulled in all directions at once – towards the comfort of acceptance, towards the dangerous territory of questions, towards a future I cannot yet name but know I must help to shape.

Father speaks of starting fresh, of planting ourselves in new soil. But what if the soil itself is corrupt? What if the very foundations we build upon are rotten with the sins of our fathers? I think of the foundry workers’ children I knew in Birmingham, their chests already rattling with each breath at fifteen, their faces grey as the soot that settled on every windowsill, and wonder what kind of garden we are cultivating for the generations yet to come.

The engine coughs and splutters as we climb a hill, much like the Empire itself – magnificent once, perhaps, but now struggling beneath its own weight. Change comes whether we will it or not, like water finding its way through stone, like shoots of grass breaking through concrete. The question is whether we shall be the gardeners of this change, or merely the weeds to be pulled up by younger, more determined hands.

P.S. I have hidden this journal beneath my mattress since Mother’s discovery. Some thoughts, like certain flowers, must bloom in secret before they are ready for the light.

The early 1960s decolonisation era saw Algeria win independence from France in 1962 after an eight-year war, and Nelson Mandela arrested in South Africa on 5th August 1962 amid apartheid repression. Algeria’s independence followed the Évian Accords and near-unanimous referendums, triggering mass European settler flight and reshaping French politics and empire. In Britain, immigration debates culminated in the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, tightening controls amid social tension in industrial cities like Birmingham. Consequences included long Algerian nation-building struggles, OAS violence’s aftermath, Mandela’s later life sentence in the Rivonia Trial, and Britain’s evolving post-imperial immigration policy.

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved. | 🌐 Translate