The Abbey and the Airbase

The first thing you notice when you exit London is the silence. The city’s noise becomes an abstract memory. “In silence there is eloquence,” wrote Rumi. “Stop weaving and see how the pattern improves.” Lying awake at night, there is utter silence. It is loud, almost physical, and revealing what is usually hidden, such as heartbeat, expectation. It also gives meaning to what comes next. Without silence, sound would have no shape.

The artist and the artist’s mother visited “the Abbey” to light a candle for my recently deceased father-in-law—an attentive man of wide interests, still deeply grieved by the family. The real abbey itself was founded by Henry I in 1130 on the site of a late-Saxon church. It didn’t survive Henry VIII and Cromwell. It was dissolved and largely destroyed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s. People still call the main church “the Abbey” because of historical memory, physical closeness, habit, not because it was ever officially the abbey.

The staff, or crosier, were preparing for a children’s nativity play. The canon, in a multicoloured waistcoat, was melodically counting chairs—“167 in all”—while his endearing wingman, a much taller man with a generous belly, shifted large objects about like a roadie in a recently re-formed heavy metal band.

Enter, stage right, a comedian famous for a television series set in the area, made with her equally eccentric younger brother, on the familiar theme of poverty wrestling with hope. Though the abbey called for a semi-serious demeanour from Our Lady of the Laughs, you could sense a desire to break out into wonderfully anarchic humour. I stared up at the sunlight through the stained-glass windows, remembering a monk I once knew who would clasp his hands and tilt his head right back and himself erupt into cosmic laughter—as if that were the only response to life’s vicissitudes.

There is a large cemetery a mile from the abbey. It includes the graves of young Polish and Czech airmen from the Second World War—surnames such as Gmitera, Janowicza, Mielcarka, Skrzypka, Stefanusa, and Maleńczuka. After Poland was invaded in 1939, many Polish pilots escaped to France and eventually the UK, where they were assimilated into the Royal Air Force and Polish-manned squadrons. More than 17,000 Poles had served with the RAF by the end of the war.

Buried nearby are two twenty-one-year-old Czech airmen, František Doležal and Oldřich Fiala. Their Magister P2448 went down shortly after takeoff in February 1941. Polish and Czech dignitaries still grace these immaculate headstones. The war dead are always chilling and moving: chilling because of the absurdity of war, moving because of the extraordinary care taken over such sites. “A nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces, but also by the men it honours, the men it remembers,” said JFK—himself arguably killed in action and, more recently, forcibly made to squeeze up at the Kennedy Centre.

Not far from here is an airbase which, during Trump’s command, still hosts units and operations of the United States Air Force. Used regularly for USAF deployments and exercises, its presence includes the 501st Combat Support Wing and U-2 reconnaissance detachments. It is the USAF’s primary European forward operating location for heavy bombers and reconnaissance aircraft. Each year, over the festive period, its American crews—when not working—enjoy the hospitality of kind-hearted villagers. Local draught bitter is served for them in large pint glasses by publicans in time-honoured pubs, many pre-dating the time when the United States separated from Britain.

Nowadays, the US government is revoking visas for British citizens. People from here are being told increasingly they cannot visit. They are not welcome. Go home is the gist. This presents an awkward conundrum. Among those high-profile enough for us to know about them are Clare Melford, British co-founder and chief executive of the Global Disinformation Index, and Imran Ahmed, head of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate—though a US judge is now blocking authorities from detaining or deporting him. It seems Bash the Brits remains a minor nationalist pastime among tribal Trumpers—a possibly shrinking faction that mistakes itself for a nation.

On Christmas Eve, the US Undersecretary of State Sarah Rogers went online to taunt Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, a close ally of Ahmed, childishly posting an inane image of herself in a Santa hat above the words: “Hey McSweeney. Merry Christmas.” Ahmed has since been accusing tech giants of “sociopathic greed.” As a result, one or two Brits are now beginning to wonder how many of our American guests agree with this lack of a welcome for Brits. At what point, in such strained circumstances, does an American military presence here risk being misread by a minority as a form of occupation?

Our American friends in power insist this country is “seeking to suppress American viewpoints.” Brits, in turn, now accuse Americans of undermining free speech by revoking visas. Not that this unease is about Americans themselves, whose generosity here is palpable, but rather about the language and actions of those currently speaking in their name.

And, as if it needed saying, Elon Musk is still attacking Brits when they complain about racist, antisemitic, and extremist content on his platform. It is curious we hear so little about censorship in Saudi Arabia or Russia, only about Europe. Is it because of a broader hostility towards liberal democracies? Then again, we do live in a world in which one particular family, for example, was allegedly offered a nuclear power plant—stolen from another country—in order to mine cryptocurrency.

The past is indeed another country. The town hosting the abbey was once a major Roman city, the second largest after Londinium. Beware: empires do rise and fall. Even out walking, it is easy to imagine the clatter of the past—an irate centurion resenting the bitter winds. Only mosaics, walls, and a broken-toothed amphitheatre survive. They say it didn’t take long for the place to shrink after Rome fell. Not until the twelfth to fifteenth centuries was there a revival of sorts with the wool trade, when certain landowners galloped through towns and villages viciously whipping locals to clear out of the way.

Today, it is a well-heeled historic market town of wax candles, leather boots, and charity bookshops stocked with Picadors from the 1970s. Even at its centre there is those blasts of silence again. That is, until a local busker on the pavement—a tribal elder of sorts—starts playing Dylan’s Masters of War, perhaps in the perverse hope that some passing US airman, welcomed all the same, might strafe him with coins.

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