Bittersweet Christmas Countdown #2
Jona Lewie: Stop the cavalry
Christmas is a time when peace and violence often jostle for the upper hand. We met Herod’s massacre of the innocents in missive number two. You have probably read about the legendary Christmas détente during the first world war, and crooned along to John and Yoko’s ‘war is over’ My favourite song on the subject is ‘Stop the Cavalry’ courtesy of Jona Lewie.
When I was in junior school we were lucky enough to live in Cyprus. It was December 1980 and I was off school shivering in bed listening to the local forces radio. Episkopi was ironically belting out Lewie’s contrary Christmas classic. I must have listened to it over 20 times over the next 3 days — I’m not sure where the song ended and reality began. I seemed to swirl through the mud of Passchendaele and the murk of Arnhem as the fever slowly left my body. Unlike the fever, the song and its poignancy has never left me and nuances itself with every passing Christmas.
For those not acquainted with it’s weary charms, we have a central protagonist who Jona describes as ‘an eternal soldier’ who has been fighting through the ages. He misses his Beloved and rails against the authorities in the vein of Siegfried Sassoon in a Pat Barker novel. There is also a nod to mutually assured destruction with a line about nuclear fallout shelters. As a politically aware geek I also remember this time as the rise of Solidarity in Gdansk and a guessing game about how the Kremlin would react and the implications for world peace, or for that matter nuclear war.
Against this darkly bellicose shroud, we have the extraneously jolly pomp of a brass band and of course the jingly earworm that counterpoints our hero’s weary wish to be home at Christmas. Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding…..
Lewie asserts that this was meant as a protest song rather than a Christmas one. Whatever it is, it delivers ‘bittersweet’ perfectly. We have love and separation, meeting the desire for peace and normality all muddled up in aeon of endless killing. For me this is more gutsy and honest than ‘war is over’ and respects the perspective of the hundreds of millions who have laid down their lives. This song allows one to be a seeker of a peace and also an advocate for those who have born arms in what they believed was a just war.
The brass band is their collective heartbeat and its cheery melody the inexhaustible ability of the human spirit to show grace, bravery and dignity even in the darkest of times.
