12. Life During Wartime (with apologies to the Talking Heads)

Whenever I start to get twitchy about how little I am doing to resist/reform/fight/FIX the facist hellscape I’m currently living in, how little I realistically can do day in & day out, I start to think about a story I wrote about the Revolutionary War back when I was in junior high.

Bear with me, I promise it will make sense eventually.

Lemmee digress to explain “junior high.” IN those days some districts in Indiana ran elementary through K-6 and then set up the middle greades as 7th through 9th. High School only ran 3 years. This had the double bonus of keeping freshmen in the smaller pond instead of throwing them into the deep end at the overcrowded high school where they would be drown in bullies, AND allowing children who didn’t want to go to school past age 14 to skip enrolling in High School at all and go straight to factories with work permits. 9th grade graduation ceremony was a HUGE deal where I lived.

Yeah. Different world. Worked better in 1950 than 1980. The system was breaking down a decade before my class came through. ANYWAY. Revolutionary war story and daily life in a hellscape. That’s what this is about.

I was in 7th grade, new to this whole Junior High experience, excited about going to new classes EVERY HOUR, getting to work with MULTIPLE TEACHERS, and terrified about meeting new people.

In social studies, we got a big assignment to write A story. This was huge. Academic permission to daydream up imaginary things? MINDBLOWING.

Remember, please, that I loathed writing. I loved making up stories, but WRITING them into a form that made sense to other people was hard, frustrating, physically exhausting, and mentally complicated. My handwriting was gobsawful, for one thing, and for another, my ideas do not fall out of my brain in an order that makes coherent sense (as anyone who’s attempted to convert with me when I’m excited—or attempting to read this story—can attest. This post would be utterly incomprehensible to others if I hadn’t moved whole paragraphs around, changed phrase order in multiple places, changed verbs, subjects and lots of other invisible editing things. Even so, it’s not exactly a nice smooth plot progression, now is it? I won’t even go into all the digressions I outright deleted.)

ANYWAY. Writing was not a thing I enjoyed, but it was combining reading(research) with making up stories, two things I loved that I’d never had a chance to do in school without getting chastised, so it was still exciting.

The assignment was combined with some kind of national contest. Might have been about the bicentennial, now that I think about it. The contest/writing assignment was “Write about the Revolutionary War through the eyes of someone your age.” A set number of stories would be chosen from all the assignments to get passed along to the contest.

Writing creatively was not a thing I enjoyed, back then. I loved telling stories, and I liked drawing stories, but making sentences is HARD for me. I hated the emotional exposure of showing words to other people because no one ever said anything good about them.

But this assignment? I thought maybe this would be worth the effort. Historically-based fiction was a thing I read a lot back then. The Witch Of Blackbird Pond, The Island Of The Blue Dolphins, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, and The Lord Of the Rings were all among my favorite books. I liked history nonfiction even more. We owned the American Heritage Illustrated History of the United States, all 20+ volumes of it, and I leafed through it all the time.

The instructions had details about how our stories shouldn’t be about Big Battles or Major Events, but more about Daily Life During Revolutionary Times. Basically they wanted the kids to imagine, what it would’ve been like to be an ordinary person living an ordinary life while Historic Events were going on elsewhere? The inspiration books were ones like Johny Tremaine & My Brother Sam Is Dead.

Now, I loathed Johnny Tremaine, though, and refused to read MBSID because, even then I had little patience with characters being coincidentally right there for historically important happenings. I liked the daily life details. People-doing-things stories.

SO THAT’S WHAT I WROTE. I did loads of research, as much as someone my age could do in those days of card catalogues, Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, and much less published academic material available to the public than even ten years later, much less now. Oh, how I do love nigh-instant access to academic content journals through the magic of the internet. The more I read, the more my character came to life in my imagination.

I was extremely proud of my little slice-of-life picture of a little girl whose historically accurate doings were touched by distant conflicts, who had big feelings about Big Historical events but was not herself active in any of them. Her parents struggle to keep food on the table amid shortages and disruptions, but she is too young to do anything substantial, so she feels helpless and frustrated. She spends her days doing all the things she’s always done—market day, washing, schoolwork, sewing, cooking—only distracted and terrified by the tales of distant battles read aloud by newscriers and embellished by rumor. She worries about her brother and her friends’ siblings who go off to fight for glory, and she suffers the weird disconnected grief that comes from a loved one dying far from home.

Was it a good story? Probably not. Almost certainly not. I was 12 and thanks to personal computers not existing yet I was writing by hand, which meant that every sentence got rewritten a dozen times, after I changed the word order a half dozen more. The results were stilted and stiff at best. But I’d made up a whole human being from my imagination and let her tell her own story through diary entries, and I loved her the way only a 12-year-old can love.

I was—and still am—proud of that story. So was my mother the retired history & English teacher, who usually had faint praise to my writing efforts. She liked my story. She thought it was compelling, realistic, and heartfelt. That mattered the world to me.

My teacher refused to enter it in the national contest. I got an A on the paper I turned in, but the teacher said it didn’t qualify because I hadn’t stuck my protagonist into any big historical events. It was, in her words, “well-written and accurate but boring.” My mother (who was not on great terms with this teacher) went ballistic in my defense, but to no avail. Mom also possibly made remarks about petty dictators who punished children for the sins of having the parents, but that didn’t change the result.

That paper is long lost to the mists of time, but I’ve never forgotten it. Obviously.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that story, lately. Not so much about the boring part, or the sting of being rejected from a contest, but the accurate part.

Human beings are ill-equipped, psychologically, to accept the reality of life during wartime anywhere except on the battlefield. War can be going on, with people bleeding, starving and dying by the tens of thousands, with whole cities and territories being devastated, while people everywhere the conflict isn’t local just—go on living.

All the everyday demands on our time and energy don’t stop just because History or maybe even HISTORY in all-caps is happening all around us. All our little daily routines will keep cycling around, maybe altered but slowly, in ways it’s hard to spot except in retrospect, until or unless a battle reaches our very doorsteps.

The world is at war right now. Not the US, directly, at the moment I’m writing this, but that’s irrelevant. The world is a huge place. Far more noncombatants than combatants have existed during every conflict in history. Even in the two World Wars, less than 10% of the world’s population was actively mobilized as soldiers.

Do we end up with more battlefields because battlefield stories are the only ones people think are interesting enough to tell? I don’t know. But I do think about it a lot.

Okay, I think I’ve talked myself to the end of this one. Did I have a point to make? I don’t even know anymore.

postscript: that Revolution story and the fallout from it are the reason all my teenaged self-insert fanfic was done in sketched-image notes or whispered into a tape recorder and erased after a single listen. (and there was a lot of self-insert fanfic, of course there was, I was a teenaged nerd girl who saw Star Wars & read all the Deryni novels along with LoTR.)

But that’s a different story.