My husband was born in communist Albania 27 years ago.
He remembers queuing with his father at 4 o' clock in the morning for meat, frozen in strorage months before and other essential goods of various kinds. Most mornings he had to queue for something.
People were muted and numbed by the constant background noise of fear. The sounds of which imprisioned people from the inside, with the barb wire of whispers and threats. Much as they were imprisoned on the outside by walls and weapons.
Roads were empty and silent at night.
Even the slate coloured sky seemed to be closing in at times.
Once communisim collapsed the country went into chaos. The economy disolved. The weapons of oppression were handed out to children and men, young and old. Gunshot punctuated the days and nights, turning the sky grey whatever the hour. The people were still not free.
My husband's family lived in the North, near the Kosovan border. Kosovo was largley populated by ethnic Albanians and they had some cousins who lived there so they decided to move away from the violence.
For a sweet breath of month's life seemed good.
Yet their peace did not last.
Soon war would fragment and scatter a familliar pattern of sorrow and loss.
The Kosovan war with Serbia devastated the land and the people who had lived on it.
My husband saw many atrocities as a child.
Old men standing over the bodies of their only children. Shot. In front of them.
Houses burned down with families trapped inside, the sound of screaming rendered almost inaudible by the horror.
Children left without parents or home. Lost, abandoned, laying on dirt.
My husband came to Britain as a refugee not long after.
He came alone. Children were granted asylum quickly in those days.
His parents now live in Albania once more, and their life, though poor is thankfully free from violence and bloodshed.
Many people my husband knew were killed, and there is much he dosen't talk about. Blank spaces, best filled with the future rather than the past.
War, involves children. It is an inescapable fact.
I look at my little girls, Laying peacefully in their beds, and my heart breaks for those children whose childhood's have been brutally torn from them. The children who's parents have been killed and who have no loving arms to console them in the darkness. The children who have been recruited to kill. To become soldiers in a war they are the victims, not the perpetraters of.
I look into the clear blue pools of light that are my 1 year old's eyes. And I pray that know child's eyes should see the red stain of blood. Just the sunlight and the green grass and the water on their toes.
I thought it was about time I introduced my long suffering husband.
