In 1941

Stalin revoked the Leninist principle
of free higher education for all. He thus
created a new aristocracy, the nomenklatura.

In 1941, the year that I was born, Belfast
suffered its only bombings by the Nazis,
hitting the house just 100 yards from mine
where CS Lewis lived before he moved to London.

The 1940s were, numerically speaking,
the worst-ever years for human beings :
the millions shipped in cattle-cars
Eastwards to their deaths, the millions
killed by Nazis on the Russian Front,
the millions of Russians, Germans, Ukrainians
killed by Stalin, the thousands of surviving Jews
who fled renewed pogroms in Poland
or shipped themselves South to Mediterranean
and Black Sea ports on their way to Palestine
(stopping off in British camps on Cyprus),
the hundreds of thousands killed by British, German
and American bombs, the devastated cities,
the millions of South Asians in what was British India
fleeing the new India or the new Pakistan,
many of them slaughtered, the hundreds of thousands
of Chinese and Koreans killed by the Japanese,
and hundreds of thousands more killed by famine,
the Indonesians massacred first by Japanese and then the Dutch,
the bombs on Hiroshima and on Nagasaki...and so on,
while I in a bigoted and slumbering suburb of Belfast was aware
of none of it, not even of the celebrations to end the wars,
nor, of course, the Irish Free State more quietly 
becoming a Republic in 1948 than Trinidad and Tobago
this week - though, strangely,
I think that I remember Czechoslovakia,
much less quietly, becoming a 'Soviet Satellite'.