Wartime ghosts gettop billing in memoir

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This article was published 02/12/2023 (728 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Actor and author R.H. Thomson refuses to wear a poppy. He is willing to carry one but feels wearing one is too conformist. And he’s not happy how the Legion has purloined the emblem of the poppy for their use only.

That nonconformist streak, which he says came from his father, who served on corvettes in the Royal Canadian Navy in the Second World War, runs through every chapter of this memoir and plea for change in how we memorialize war and our search for peace.

The ghost light in the title is a theatrical reference to a light left on after the actors have left the stage at the end of a performance. The ghosts in this case are his family members who served in the First World War.

Eight of his great uncles served, and his godmother Margaret also was a wartime surgical nurse in Europe. Five of his great uncles were killed in action, while two others returned home to face shortened lives from their lungs being scarred by disease and poison gas.

From an extensive archive of family photos and letters, Thomson has them come on stage so the ghosts become visible, audible and distinct characters — similar to Peter Jackson’s astonishing documentary film They Shall Grow Not Old.

Some are strongly supportive of defeating the Hun, while others come to find their flag waving suspect, a reminder that there is no one more bloodthirsty than a civilian.

Thomson does occasionally speak for them or extrapolate from an example, and willingly admits he keeps several in the wings although they are eager to take centre stage.

By the Ghost Light would appear to have been a lifetime in preparation. His campaign titled The World Remembers, which he says got its start in Winnipeg, attempts to name every soldier in every army who fought and died in the First World War. That project was featured by illuminating Canadian military names on Canada House in London on the centenary of the First World War, and continues to inform and persuade on its website. It’s an attempt to name the poor lowly soldier who, if remembered at all, may have “known unto God” as his epitaph, while the generals get the statues.

Most persuasive is Thomson’s commentary on how war is perceived, before, during and after hostilities. In each case, he argues, self justification takes centre stage.

“The before stories create the conditions in which nations decide to fight and provide megaphones for patriots. The middle set of stories are told during a war… search for meaning… since we all dread a world in which people are killed for no reason… The third set try to understand the conflict or, some would say, to shape it to a particular point of view.”

This last, after the war, may determine if wars will be fought again.

By The Ghost Light is a well crafted, challenging, deliberately upsetting mix of history, biography, quiet admonition and a hope for a better world.

Thomson includes a warning heard down the ages: “I resist stories that employ external threats to gain narrative power…Inhaling the ideology of ‘Our enemies are only from elsewhere’ creates a mental fortress inside which we can bestow innocence on ourselves and villainy on others. So secured, we often grant ourselves licence to use violence with impunity.”

Reads like today’s headline.

Ron Robinson wears a poppy every Remembrance Day and says thanks, Dad.