A childish chalk scribble of a swastika on a path behind Ely Cathedral has stirred up my emotions at a few levels.
First of all, I detest seeing graffiti in the town of Ely. It makes the place, population 20,000, seem too urban in a gang-ridden way. Ely is not that. But it does have bored youth hanging around convenience stores and school playgrounds late at night. The spate of graffiti in Ely started before the pandemic and is not limited to swastikas. In fact, most of the graffiti has been the tag ‘Ray’ spray-painted in large bubbly letters, often pink, sometimes blue. (Gender identity issues?) Using #findray on social media, residents have assumed that this is the work of a teenage boy. Police have been searching for him for two years now, visiting schools with photos of the tag. The parish and district councils are also on the trail of this elusive vandal, bent on defiling our beautiful town. Parochial annoyance, I know, and I have sucked into it.
Secondly, swastikas offend people. On some walls and fences spray-painted swastikas have been found in close proximity to ‘Ray.’ The District Council clean-up crew removed the swastikas – on the basis of their power to offend – and left Ray’s other self-absorbed scrawls behind for property owners to contend with. For most adults these are symbols of Nazism and anti-Semitism, but I do wonder if that’s what Ray had in mind. Ely is not known for its Jewish population, and in the ward where Ray operates, Jewish people make up 0.2% of the residents.
This reminds me of an incident that happened in Fountainebleau, France a few months ago. A cemetery was peppered with swastika graffiti, headstones desecrated with bright spray-painted signs. Problem – this was a Catholic cemetery. The Jewish cemetery was up the road. Either these vandals had a faulty GPS or they didn’t understand the meaning of the swastika since the 1920’s (it had been used before then by various groups in history, such as being the symbol for Surya the Hindu son god). I suspect that Ray and his French counterparts were cut from the same idiot’s cloth, possessing a miniscule amount of knowledge, enough to know that swastikas offend and little else.
Finally (for now), upon seeing the chalky swastika on the Ely path, the other emotion that came to the fore was strangely one of nostalgia. Stay with me. When I was around five years old I found some broken plasterboard in the alley behind our apartment. Any city child will tell you that a shard of plasterboard makes for a great piece of chalk. At this age, I probably had limited writing abilities coupled with a limited vocabulary. I guess I had the wherewithal to understand the importance of context and copied the words that I had seen in other public spaces – ‘screw,’ ‘fuck’ and ‘hell’ – on to the pavements of Ashland Avenue, Chicago. I don’t know how she found out, but she did, and my mother sent me outside with a bucket and scrub brush to remove my first ever attempts at graffiti. If only Ray was answerable to my mother.
Paola Trimarco 