A life in letters: Falklands War

The Falklands War seemed to come from nowhere. First, there were reports that Argentinian scrap dealers had raised the Argentinian flag on South Georgia on 19 March 1982. (It later emerged that they had been infiltrated by Argentinian Marines.) Then, on 2 April, the Argentine invaded the Falkland Islands, and soon the Task Force was being assembled driven by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s conviction that the Falklands could not be abandoned.

I remember listening to the historic Saturday morning debate in the House of Commons on Saturday 3 April. I was sitting in the car on a deserted Industrial Estate on the outskirts of Airdrie. That week I had been deeply wounded when someone I fancied like mad turned me down, and not wanting to face my parents with whom I was still living when I felt so so miserable, I took myself out. I channelled the pain-driven energies into writing a drama for the Airdrie Academy Christian Union weekend away on the life of the biblical character Gideon, with the car radio on in the background

In my opinion Margaret Thatcher grossly over-reacted. No matter how long the Falklands had been in British hands, the fact of their geographical proximity suggested to me that Argentina had a perfectly legitimate claim to them. An instinctive pacifist, I balked at the idea of sending people to war, particularly in such a dubious cause.

As the Task Force was assembled and sailed south, during the weeks of battle, and particularly after the victory, I realised how hard it would be to stand against a war which seemed to have gripped the patriotic imagination of so many fellow Scots.

I remember sitting in Airdrie Baptist Church as spring sunshine shafted down the polished Victorian woodwork, feeling some anxiety about this war we were in, and a sense of empathy with those who had filed into the same pews in 1914 and 1939. The walls of that room were no strangers to sadness.

Information about the progress of the war was tightly controlled, and we became familiar with the face and voice of Ian Macdonald the civil servant who made official announcements about the progress of the war at Ministry of Defence press briefings. Brian Hanrahan, on the aircraft carrier HMS Hermes watched Harrier Jump Jets flying out on a sortie, and not permitted to reveal the number of aircraft involved, famously announced ‘I counted them all out and I counted them all back.’ At lunchtime, some of us would join Iain Morris in his English classroom at the school, and we’d watch the latest reports.  There we saw film of the sinking of the Argentinian vessel General Belgrano which led to the loss of over 300 lives. Two days later, the Argentinians destroyed HMS Sheffield, and 20 died.

I’d come out of the National Library of Scotland and was standing at a ‘bus stop on Edinburgh’s George IV Bridge when I saw the evening paper billboard announcing that the Falklands had been re-taken on Monday 14June following the recapture of Port Stanley.

But I was never persuaded that the result was worth the tragic loss of life.