Antony Barlow
The Friends Ambulance Unit in WWII
The wartime correspondence of Ralph and Joan Barlow
Edited by Antony Barlow
As we reach the 80th anniversary of the year my father joined The Friends Ambulance Unit, it is perhaps an appropriate moment to take another look at this remarkable voluntary organization, comprised of people from many different backgrounds – Quaker of course, but also Methodist, Anglican and non-denominational – all of whom joined to make a difference.
This book attempts to tell the personal story of one of these, my father, not through a detailed day-to-day account of the Unit’s many life-saving acts both at home and abroad, but through the many letters my parents wrote to each other, while my father was serving abroad in the Middle East, East Africa, India, and China, telling of their own struggles, either with depression or separation or bringing up two children in war-torn Britain. In one of his letters he called the FAU ‘An Exacting Mistress’, which I have taken as a title.
Though, of course, it touches on the war, the book specifically does not tell the story of the fighting that took place throughout the Second World War, not only in the UK, but worldwide. To most that is well known and well documented.
Instead this book tries to tell the story in between these spaces, where in the midst of battle there are people trying their best to save the lives of the wounded, whether they be civilians caught in the crossfire of enemy bombing or soldiers wounded in what Wilfred Owen calls the ‘cess of war’. This is the story of those who joined the Friends Ambulance Unit in 1939 and 1940, not to fight, but to bear witness to another way, standing against ‘the truth untold, / The pity of war, the pity war distilled’ (Wilfred Owen, enemy soldier in ‘Strange Meeting’).
My father started a memoir which he began in his usual understated way as follows: ‘In the course of the war, I was fortunate enough to travel rather widely and I have ventured to think that extracts from my letters to Joan might be of interest.’ I have tried my best to complete his work as he envisaged it but in addition to add my mother’s replies in as well, forming a fuller picture of the way the war unravelled for one family.
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Forty-Three e-Newsletter • Number 503 • March 2021
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW
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