Shaking Still

When PJ Harvey won her second Mercury Music Prize this week for her album Let England Shake - the first artist to win twice - an unsettling symmetry emerged.

It was on September 11th, 2001, that the musician from Dorset won her first award. But she was unable to collect it, confined, as she was, to a hotel room in Washington D.C., watching smoke rise from the Pentagon; grounded, along with the rest of the US, and shaken, like the rest of the world.

We had all wondered how the new century - and millennium - would begin, and this was our answer; one we didn't dare imagine. A decade later, and we are still reaping the bitter fruits of that fateful September day, and the West's descent into what the philosopher John Gray calls perpetual war.

Let England Shake is PJ Harvey's coming-to-terms with this bewildering time; a period when global events we struggled to comprehend then hit home hard. The "7/7" bombings were less cinematic, perhaps, but they left flesh daubed on tubes and buses, nonetheless, and hearts heartlessly broken.

A thread of coffins latterly has weaved its way through Wootton Bassett, where shopkeepers and war veterans and lollipop ladies have borne our dead back with grace. The injured, it seems, limp home more covertly, their wounds weeping reminders that war's victims cannot always be smoothed over with a flag. Let England Shake, indeed.

Harvey researched her album of war songs meticulously, speaking to soldiers who served in the so-called 9/11 conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. She crafted this collection of songs to bear witness, as a war musician, and to explore the broken, emotional humanity of all conflict.

We got up early,
washed our faces,
walked the fields
and put up crosses.
Passed through
the damned mountains,
went hellwards,
and some of us returned,
and some of us did not.

It's hard to know how to respond personally, whether to her music, or this decade. We can, at least, mourn with those who mourn, especially this weekend.

But next time we suffer any kind of attack - an assault on our personal pride, perhaps, or a wounding, literal or metaphorical, trivial or catastrophic - we can pray, hard, for resolve: to remember those who have fallen; and for God's sake, and theirs, and ours, to shake this world of escalating hate and respond - imagine - in love, as love, as Christ.

Brian Draper

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