Memory and atonement: Valerie Krips, on the cultural memory of Dunkirk.

I grew up in a town on the Thames Estuary, one of the little places that sent boats to Dunkirk to rescue the British Expeditionary Force and, of course, Frenchmen, Dutchmen and Belgians too, in May and June 1940. I didn't know that the father of one of the boys in my class at school had died in the attempt until I saw a BBC series on the Second World War when I was in England in 2006. My school friend's father didn't appear in the main footage, but was caught on camera in one of the scraps of film from the period that were aired on one of the high-definition BBC channels as 'extra' material. These proved to be an extraordinary resource. Fascinating in themselves, they also told stories that sometimes ran counter to the narrative of the main feature. It's easy to forget that documentary film is edited, too, and that its distinction from fictional film is a little less straightforward than we might think.

The few minutes of black and white film shot on the seafront that I knew as a playground show my friend's father, with a group of other men, in his fisherman's waterproofs, the buckles on his bib catching the light as he turns. He's talking to a Naval officer, smart and neat, who is there to look for available craft. My friend's father says, quite proudly, that he had never been out of the estuary, and didn't really know the way to France. The Naval officer said he would sort that out. What surprised me, though of course it shouldn't have, had I given it a moment's thought, was that the fishermen were, by and large, rather reluctant heroes. It wasn't just that they didn't know the way, but rather that they weren't sure they could trust their craft, and were clearly afraid of losing them. In the end, though, most of them went. My friend's father was the only one to die: his name was given at the end of the film, which is how I know what happened to him.

Dunkirk has been on my mind ever since I saw the film Atonement. While this film has received very considerable critical acclaim, several Australian friends of mine have said that they while they found the film overall very good, they thought the Dunkirk episode too long. Interestingly, none of my women friends have said this, only the men. When I saw it I was reminded of the reminiscences of the father of another friend of mine, fortunately still alive, who sweltered in the sun on the beach (it was a lovely summer in 1940, he tells me) for six days with little or no water and scarcely any food. I thought of him when I saw the film, when Turner, the man who had been wrongly imprisoned on the word of a fanciful child, and who joined up as an alternative to rotting away in gaol, looks constantly for something, anything, to drink and, finding a tap, discovers that no water comes out of it.

Before this the camera rakes the beach, in six minutes of continuous filming. It takes in the chaos on the shoreline, showing cavalry officers shooting their horses, British soldiers smashing the radiators of armoured vehicles lined up neatly on the sand beneath the promenade, men who are drunk, others soberly sorting out their uniforms and kit, others formed up into neat lines. Some are asleep, some sunbathing, others are writing letters: all, it is suggested, part of the mess, the stink, and the sheer terrifying boredom of the soldier out of action but not out of danger. As the camera swirls round a bandstand, a group of soldiers sings a hymn without the need of hymn-sheets. The camera moves round them, as if the men are on a merry-go-round which, in a way, they were. I don't know if my friend's father will see the film--probably not. I wonder whether he would have recognised the scene, found it life-like.

Dunkirk was the subject of one of the novelist J. B. Priestley's famous war-time radio talks. Down to earth and homely, his Yorkshire voice was a counterpoint to Churchill's aristocratic delivery, and though perhaps not so well remembered today, his account of Dunkirk was of great importance in inscribing the 'little pleasure boats', as Priestley called them, into the cultural memory of the war. He talked of the 'characteristic ... absurd and gallant' efforts of the 'fussy little steamers' that 'sailed into the inferno' and made an 'excursion to hell'. In Parliament, Churchill's speech referred to the 'miracle of deliverance' and the closing passages include his famous peroration: 'We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender'. This was an occasion, we were told, which would stay in memory for a thousand years --at least, so Priestley thought. It can't have seemed much like a victory to my friends' fathers, and of course, it wasn't. Had Hitler not turned his attention to Paris, the men on the beaches would have been wiped out. Yet it is remembered--when it is remembered at all--as a kind of victory, as 'snatching glory out of defeat'.

Atonement's depiction of Dunkirk, with troops massing, their equipment abandoned and their officers attempting to keep order, works with and against the cultural memory created by speeches such as Churchill's, broadcasts such as Priestley's, and popular history. The Royal Navy's destroyers took 80 per cent of the men off the beaches; but the little ships, like those from my hometown, carried the rest back, and were in constant use, ferrying the men from shore to ship. They were, like the destroyers, harried by bombing from the Luftwaffe and shelling, which was continuous. Interestingly, neither the bombing nor the shelling is apparent in Atonement's surreal version which, instead, limits itself to a swirling, fevered point of view that seems, on reflection, to represent a shocked gaze, arrested for a moment and then moving on, limiting itself to the awfulness of the tormented everyday. By comparison to the famous opening sequence of Saving Private Ryanthis is a view of war that is, perhaps, more like that of an individual in shock, capable only of registering, momentarily, what is recognisable and known.

It's a view of Dunkirk that is unlike the version that has, until now, dominated in British cultural memory. That doesn't revolve around a surrealist vision, the rapid movement of shock, which takes little in and remembers nothing in particular. There are no ships in sight in Atonement except for a wreck, from the port of London, drawn right up on the beach, its sails in shreds. Instead there are soldiers doing what soldiers, waiting, at the end of what would be called the 'Phoney War' do; one of them is crying. No one takes his hand, no one comforts him. Readers of McEwan's novel will know, as they watch the screen, that Turner is dying as he looks: what we see, in part, is his fevered imagination, looking for a way out, looking for another beach, a safe one at home with the woman he loves.

It's another kind of atonement: maybe this speaks more to the experience of the men who were there, whose memories are not quite the same as those we have learned, not quite so triumphant in the face of defeat as we have learned to remember. The power of articulate defiance, of valour from those, like the father of my friend who died, is what we recall. In that cultural memory Dunkirk is the beginning of the end of the war in Europe, the moment when the Battle of Britain, as Churchill called it, was about to begin.

What Atonementteaches us, in part, is the power of those great wartime speeches, their creation of memory which overrides some other memories, perhaps less grand, perhaps less courageous. That Dunkirk has been a lieu de memoire, a site of memory for generations of Britons, cannot be denied. It has played its part in the British story of the conflict, giving expression to the role of the non-combatants, drawing them into the effort that Churchill urged upon the nation. What Atonement's surreal account of one of the beaches upon which 'we' were to fight gives us is a way of thinking about the capacity of cultural memory to forget, as well as remember. That's why I found it so hard to understand my friends' boredom: my cultural memory was being somewhat overturned. An atonement indeed.

Valerie Krips is an editor of Arena Magazine.