Introduction

This is one version of the Greek creation myth. It considers that we started with ‘nothing’ and evolved fairly rapidly towards the environment which we experience today. In fact, this is a feature of nearly all creation myths - the Sun, the Earth, its inhabitants, and by inference, the planetary system around us, all formed soon after a divine event had acted to add purpose to the pre-existing nothingness, or chaos.

The details of the traditional scientific view are somewhat different. The Universe was created about 14 Ga ago, in the Big Bang (the exact age is unclear although somewhere between 13.7 and 13.9 Ga is the current consensus). Clumps of material then formed into galaxies, and galaxies spawned stars. From that time until the present day, the cycle of stellar birth and death has continued remorselessly. Our own Solar System formed around 4.56 Ga ago from materials that had been cycled in and out of stars several times (see Box 8.1).

There have been many different theories of how our Solar System formed. These can be split into theories suggesting that the processes that formed the Sun and the planets took place simultaneously in a single integrated event, versus theories suggesting that the planetary system was added to a pre-existing Sun, some time after the Sun's formation. These two approaches are referred to as monistic (single event) and dualistic (two separate events). An example of a dualistic theory of Solar System formation, would be the theory that another star passed close to the Sun, causing matter to be pulled from the Sun into a single filament, which then broke up along its length to form individual planets.

Introduction

Bereavement is not a pathological process, but can lead to a significant mortality and morbidity. Some children may suffer significant psychological consequences (Pettle-Michael & Lansdown, 1986) but depression is rare (Pfeffer et al, 2000). The evidence for the efficacy or usefulness of therapeutic work is limited (Harrington & Harrison, 1999; Currier et al, 2007). Research suggests that positive outcomes from therapeutic work are more likely to be achieved if certain groups of children are selected and provided ‘timely’ treatment (Currier et al, 2007). The corollary of this is that many children do well with family and community support and never need to see child mental health services (Dyregov, 2008).

Indications for bereavement work

Children may need support at times of family bereavement. There are a number of reasons the impact of bereavement on the development of children might be more pronounced.

Managing bereavement

Childhood bereavement services look at the effects of bereavement on children in a number of ways.

Introduction

The routine problems presenting to a CAMHS are likely to be addressed by those working at Tier 2 by an individual specialist mental health professional working with the problem. The demands of this everyday CAMHS work require all the specialist skills available in the service. No professional, unless at a very inexperienced stage, should not be available for Tier 2 work. To some extent the expenditure of energy on the development of the more high-profile ‘specialist’ Tier 3 teams is secondary and needs to be carefully managed to maintain availability of Tier 2 specialist provision. Treatments such as CBT are often offered by Tier 3 teams, although service members with relevant skills will do this as part of their Tier 2 work. The system needs to be coordinated and managed so that there is equity of access for required services at the most effective tier.

Requisites of Tier 2

‘Critical mass’ of staff

Meeting the needs of the community and providing a comprehensive range of services requires a critical mass of CAMHS staff with a multidisciplinary skill mix and a clear recognition of professional function.

Assessment

Assessment represents the first stage of any therapeutic relationship and professionals working at Tier 2 need a clear model of assessment.

Continuum of care

The Tier 2 professional, who may link up with Tier 1 workers, will also be in a position to access and make use of Tier 3 and Tier 4 provision where required. This highlights the importance of communication both within CAMHS and with other agencies, as well as underpinning the principle that all disciplines should be involved in this area of service provision.

Training and supervision

Staff of all disciplines require access to affordable and relevant training. Training budgets are limited and unequal in their distribution. It may be that units develop alternative funding strategies to support less well-resourced disciplines. In-house training initiatives and multi-agency and multidisciplinary training programmes are effective and keep costs down. Professional supervision is a prerequisite for effective professional functioning.

The concept of redundancy employed in this essay is the one used in mathematics and linguistics to designate symbols that do not add information to a sequence. One of the hazards of teaching twentieth-century war literature is the tacit inference of redundancy by readers, namely that the representational conventions as well as the facts and values represented are ‘predictable from … context’. The claim that twentieth-century war writing is made superfluous by War and Peace (1869) is polemical, but it is also intended to do serious work: to draw attention to representations of war which are not predictable from context, and to renew questions such as why representing war as irrational, murderous activity is unefficacious, and why we would imagine otherwise.

The designs of War and Peace as war writing can be recognised as early as 1853, when Tolstoy published a story drawing on his own military experience in the Caucasus:

In october 1099, following the conquest of Jerusalem, First Crusade forces led by Duke Godfrey of Bouillon laid siege to the city of Arsuf, about fifteen miles north of modern Tel Aviv. According to the early-twelfth-century chronicler Albert of Aachen, the city's defenders attempted to distract Godfrey by crucifying one of Godfrey's men, Gerard of Avesnes. They placed him on the city walls within sight of the siege forces. Dying yet still able to talk, Gerard begged Godfrey to avenge his suffering and death. Godfrey told Gerard that, unfortunately, he could not avenge him; diverting men to do so would cost them the city. Furthermore, he added, ‘Certainly if you have to die, it is more useful that you alone should die than that our decree and be violated and this city remain always unsafe for pilgrims. For if you die to the present life, you will have life with Christ in heaven.’ With that Gerard was left to his fate, while the crusaders continued to assault the city.

The assault failed dramatically, prompting reflection on the potential causes of God's disfavour. In particular, Godfrey's response to Gerard's request for vengeance was called into question. Arnulf of Chocques, the newly appointed patriarch of Jerusalem, roundly condemned Godfrey not only for abandoning Gerard to his fate, but especially for failing to avenge his death. Arnulf described Godfrey's actions as ‘treachery and hardheartedness … impiety … base filth of all crimes’.

Most writing about British Cold War culture has concentrated on nuclearism, pacifism, decolonisation, socialism, postmodernism, Americanisation – in short, on everything but war. One effect of the attention paid to these various narratives has been to obscure the fact that citizens of the USSR and those of Western capitalist democracies alike understood and feared the Cold War as war, even if later accounts have tended to lose sight of what Holger Nehring has called the ‘warlike character’ of their experiences. If the Cold War is to have any explanatory force as a context for literary works beyond serving as a useful periodising shorthand, then we need to know in what sense, if any, the literature of the Cold War era understood itself as a war literature. ‘What kind of war was this?’ asks the historian Anders Stephanson. ‘The two sides never went to war with each other. There is no obvious beginning, no single moment of initial aggression, no declaration of war, no crossing of a certain line, and no open military engagement.

W. H. Auden wrote that the Great War was ‘the decisive experience’ of Wilfred Owen's life. In the absence of such experience, Auden and his generation struggled to find grounds from which to write during the 1930s. In the present essay, I show that Auden's ‘Journal of an Airman’, which is Book II of The Orators (1932), reflects the legacy of the Great War for interwar English writers and ‘the guilt that every noncombatant feels’, as he calls it. This guilt is a manifestation of a larger cultural turn that military historians have traced back to the Enlightenment, in which non-transmittable knowledge is understood to be gained exclusively through sensory experience on the battlefield. That knowledge grants combat veterans the ‘authority of flesh-witnessing’. After discussing this cultural turn and how it affected Auden and his generation, I explore how positions of optical dominance inform the ‘Journal of an Airman’ and the text's concern with the idea of the poet as wartime orator – elements that presage Auden's World War II poetics. I conclude by considering an often-overlooked episode in Auden's life, when he was sent to assess the effects of air bombing on German morale as part of the 1945 US Strategic Bombing Survey.