I recently watched the Amazon Prime movie – The War Bride, starring Anna Friel and written by Angela Workman. Its portrayal of commitment struck me. That people of a certain era had what it took to stick with their promises even when it was not only unrewarding but also just plain miserable really stirred something in me. I found myself comparing the characters in this period piece to people of today who don’t have the same stamina to handle hardship. My own kids cry when I force them to eat school lunch once a week. I wonder if our soft generation would have learned how to tuck it up and deal back then.
The War Bride is set in WWII London where a young cockney woman – Lily - meets and falls in love with Canadian soldier boy - Charlie. The two marry, and just before Charlie is shipped off to fight in France, Lily confides that she’s pregnant. A few months after the birth of their daughter, Lily receives correspondence from Charlie’s family in Canada, asking her to join them to live on their ranch in Alberta. Lily finds herself quite the outcast among a family and town that’s anything but welcoming to her and her daughter. She has the opportunity to leave and join a wealthy friend who lives in Montreal and perhaps even go back to England, but, in one striking scene, she proclaims – “He’s still my husband.”
In an earlier scene in the movie, Lily states that she only has spent sixteen days with her husband, total. And yet, the vows of marriage are important enough for her to keep her promise to her husband during three years of barely seeing or hearing from him at all. Over those three years, she is tempted by attraction toward another man, and she almost runs away from her husband’s difficult family. Both times, she remembers her commitment and goes back to the ranch.
This powerful theme of commitment is threaded through the supporting characters as well. Charlie’s mother Betty, a sour woman who has suffered the loss of a husband and child, watched her adult daughter struggle with polio and her son go off to war, is not a friendly woman. She meets Lily with disdain and disapproval and does not make it easy for her daughter-in-law to fit in to the family. What Betty does not do, though, is somehow louder than what she does. She never sends Lily away or even suggests that her daughter-in-law is unwelcome. She helps with the baby and quietly tries to introduce Lily to ranch life. She teaches Lily to drive and, although she never expresses love toward the young woman, she does reprimand her own daughter’s nastiness toward Lily. Even though Betty never seems terribly cheerful, she seems to be committed to making moral choices. She also wisely advises Lily to give Charlie time after he comes back severely depressed from the war. She seems to have spent most of her life under a cloud of duress and sorrow but manages enough stamina to push through the hard times and enough hope to choose righteously throughout.
Even Charlie, a country boy who is anything but a nationalist or a cowboy, is committed enough to his country to fight in a war he doesn’t half-understand. Why? Because it is viewed as the honorable thing to do. This, to me, seems to fit into the same box as Lily’s motivation for staying with a husband she has spent sixteen days of her life with, a man she hardly knows, but whom she promised to care for forever.
I don’t think people today can imagine what it would be like to be separated from a person so completely and indefinitely. With snapchat and Facebook, it’s easy to be constantly connected to anyone, no matter where they are. I found it hard to imagine what it would be like to truly not be able to find someone, to have to wait and wait for them to respond in a letter. This concept will never compute for kids who were born after the age of Facebook. Obviously, people today are much more impatient, much more in need of instant gratification. I wonder if the necessity of waiting for things and for people, the sheer reality of the unknown, simply made people more able to deal with the harshness of life. Dealing with hardships built stamina.
Staying committed perhaps bred hope.
I like to think I would have been as strong as Lily, that I would have gracefully waited for Charlie to come back and then waited some more for him to deal with the inner monsters that the war planted in his psyche. I would like to be this strong, but at this point int my life, I can’t honestly lay claim to that boldness of character. Maybe someday.
If you have Amazon prime, check out The War Bride. Maybe it will make you examine your thoughts on commitment and hardships. Maybe it will inspire hope in you, as it did for me, that though there is no instant gratification when walking through hard times, perseverance will see you come out on the other end of the struggle.
Stronger.
Wiser.
And gratified by something far deeper than anything that can develop in an instant.