Military Wives
Last night Emma and I watched a really moving film, “Military Wives”[1], starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan. You may be familiar with it, or may have seen the Gareth Malone TV series “The Choir” first aired in 2006 which inspired it.
It’s a story
about the spouses of military personnel while their loved ones are deployed on
duty in Afghanistan, and how they find support, and even an outlet for their
emotion by joining an unlikely choir, of varying musical ability, who
eventually get to perform their own song in the Royal Albert Hall.
Well as you
can imagine, it’s very emotional viewing. There’s the young bride, who gets that
devastating visit that no military service family wants to get, there’s the
Colonel’s wife who has already lost her soldier son and whose husband is caught
up in an explosion.
And yet it’s
as funny as it is moving, thanks in part to the brilliant dialogues between
chalk and cheese choir mistresses Kate and Lisa. Well in a week where Bagram
airbase just north of Kabul was handed back to the Afghan government last
Thursday, it felt close to home.
And when I
looked closely at the credits at the end, I saw that Wyton and Brampton Airbases’
military choirs were featured in a final song at the end.
I don’t know
if there are military families listening today. If there are, we now understand
just a tiny bit more the different emotions that you must face whenever your
loved ones go on military exercise. Thank you for what you and your families go
through on a daily basis for us.
I think the
main message that I got from the film was that we all need one another. People
go through so much in their everyday lives, not least in the difficult last 16
months of Covid, and we need to support one another.
Is there
someone in your community (whether in the military or not) who you could reach
out to today- a phone call, a text message, just to see how they are doing? In
the Bible it says “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our
troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we
ourselves receive from God”.
Charlie Newcombe 7/7/21