Nagasaki Day 2024 at the Worthing Peace Tree

Transcript

00:00In our neighbouring church was someone called Mary Scott and her grandfather was a Church

00:16of Scotland minister from Galashiels and he worked in Manchuria in Northern China and

00:23after Pearl Harbour he was one of those who was interned by the Japanese and they were

00:32sent to a Polish monastery in Nagasaki and were there when the bomb dropped and it was

00:41about midday on the 9th of August and Nagasaki was one of the first places where Christianity

00:49came to Japan and the Catholic Cathedral was in the centre of town and it was in fact while mass

00:57was being celebrated on the Feast of the Transfiguration that the nuclear bomb was dropped.

01:03But her grandfather's task was to look after the monastery cow and that meant that he was out in

01:11the countryside when the bomb dropped and he wrote, there was a single plane in the sky and

01:19then a light terrifying in its intensity which so filled my mind that I had no sense of the

01:26explosion afterwards and when I got up the first thing that I saw was the mushroom cloud. Now there

01:34was a low hill between the monastery and Nagasaki which shielded me from the blast and looking one

01:41way there seemed little different and looking the other was a scene of utter devastation. We were

01:48deeply distressed as we found that our cook who'd been friendly had been in the city that lunchtime

01:55and had never returned. We never saw him again. Our morning prayers the next day took the form

02:03of a memorial service and the text was Matthew 25 40, in as much as he did this to the least of my

02:11brethren, you did it unto me. A month later John Dawood walked through Nagasaki. The outskirts of

02:20the city were burned black with the occasional chimney still standing but the centre was fused

02:26into a brick red mess. Mary Scott Wright wrote, please use my grandfather's memoirs in your vigil

02:37anything that can demonstrate how awful this was and how it should never be repeated has to be used

02:45and let us pray for peace.