The Silver Sword - A Barbados Experience

One day, while my class was discussing what they knew about the background to the novel, the Silver Sword and about World Wars, a little boy bravely asked, 'What does World War 2 have to do with Barbados?" This question surprised me because it was the same question asked two nights before at a talk at the Barbados Museum and Historical society. This time the asker was at least fifty years old and followed up the question with the comment that the WW2 Exhibit at the museum needed to be taken down because it was not of relevance to anybody. At that point, those persons who had lived through WW2 as children nearly fainted with outrage and their testimomies of war time patriotism and hardship alerted me to the fact that WW2 did have something to do with Barbados and that we postcolonials have lost that sense of mission and triumph that  our forebears felt then in the global theatre of war.

So, I asked my students to generate a list of questions about the background to the novel and about Barbados' participation in World War 2. Then armed with our list we went to the Barbados Museum's War exhibit for a tour conducted by Miguel, one of the research officers. My aim ws not just to give the kids a history lesson but to relate the context of the novel to Barbados at the time, to humanize the characters  and to have the children acknowledge the universality of their struggles.

To do this, it seemed I had to abandon the general and start with the specificic. I was able to refer to the novel on a number of occasions. The kids were able to see actual soldiers uniforms and medals, the names of Barbadians who had fought in this war that seemed so remote and foreign. They used the ration card artifact to design their own ration card for one of the characters in the book. The boys loved the pictures of planes and fighting machinery and glimpses of the life in a war zone given by the  pictures and postcards from the front. Teacher loved the letters from the front and it gave me the idea for a literature assignment.

But learning went way beyond one novel. The children and I learned that Barbadians who lived on the coast turned off lights at night to prevent submarines from seeing our coastline., that two ships were attacked that fateful day in the Harbour but because of the nets secretly placed between the ships and the subs little damage was done to one ship and the Cornwallis was sunk only because  a missile penetrated a hole in the nets that was caused by a previous torpedo.

I have to say thanks to the little boy who dared to ask and in so doing opened up a world of information to his fellow students and his teacher.



Here are some interesting links on the subject:

How to Explore War with Children

The Barbados Museum has also added a "War Diaries" digital testimonial to its WW2 Exhibit.

If you have an interesting teaching story, share it with us. Email us at readbarbados@gmail.com